Ever more demanding customers, brutal price competition, rising administrative costs, sinking profit margins – a scenario to which trade is exposed day by day. Information about new products must be furnished and evaluated while brochures must be designed, printed and distributed more and more quickly.

Only those who can combine professional customer service with the fastest processes, permanent availability of information and lean administration.

Meter-long file shelves, packed hanging filing systems and illegible faxes are merely counterproductive. Just the search alone for information pertinent to customer or supplier requests occupies employees' time so intensively that the most valuable resource, the customer, has to wait.

Here, modern document and information management solutions can be of assistance, with which you can create an information platform for all employees across all departments and branches. All documents – be it requests received by email or post, minutes from meetings, orders, offers, delivery notes, bills, product information or process status information – are available in an electronic supplier or customer file.

As a general rule, all authorised employees can open the different documents with a single program – e.g. a web browser.

The documents are available in a uniform format, for example as TIFF or PDF. This simplifies the important demand for legally compliant archiving even over 30 years or more. Appropriate tools that are based on, for example, the current standard format for PDF/A long-term archiving ensure simple handling and guarantee readability over decades. You can thus electronically archive all invoices from your merchandise information system or your AS/400 at the push of a button – and retrieve them again within seconds, even with several million invoices.

Are you perhaps wondering how your incoming documents even end up in such a central information platform as you reflect on your inbox full of countless bills, requests and orders each day?

Here as well, innovative solutions are available that have proven successful in practice. With their assistance, the post is centrally scanned and automatically sorted by type of document. At the same time, they can read business-relevant information and forward it to the appropriate department for processing.

That is the way in which, for example, bills find their way into your ERP system without error-prone manual recording and are automatically processed. This not only saves time, but additionally provides you with the attractive possibility of a discount.

Your advantages in implementing innovative document and information management solutions at a glance:

- Shorter search times and thus quicker reaction
  to requests of all sorts

- Global preparation of all sales and
  customer information over the internet

- Higher service quality for customers,
  suppliers and partners

- Quicker processing of inbox contents,
  especially of bills

- Space-saving and legally compliant archiving
  of commercial documents.