Implemetation of a cloud-based document management system (DMS) handles the archiving of customer-relevant documentation for ADM with expansion of DocuWare usage.
Sector: Finance
ADM Investor Services International (ADMISI) was founded in 1930 in London as a service provider for the global food group ADM, initially responsible for the financial security of the group's internal production. The business was quickly expanded to include external customers and other financial services. Today, ADMISI has around 140 employees and offers a full range of investment services in brokerage and clearing, serving over 1,200 customers worldwide.
Challenge
Before their DMS was introduced, each client required a great deal of paper documentation – 400 to 500 documents from ongoing trading quickly accumulated, including declarations of consent, signed forms and financial statements. Employees had to hunt down individual documents from their archive, again and again, or spend time storing new documents.
Though they had to be sure to meet strict regulatory requirements, paper-based storage was simply not sustainable in the long term. A few years earlier, ADMISI’s finance department had used DocuWare, but really only for digitising a few documents.
It soon became clear in conversations with Restore that using the system more intensively would be worthwhile. The next step was to create a suitable digital filing structure so that previously paper-based customer files could be mapped electronically. Existing files were scanned on site together with help of Restore Digital and gradually transferred to electronic file cabinets.
Solution
DocuWare delivered a number of key improvements:
- Central document pool stores all customer files
- When storing new documents, all it takes is to enter a customer’s name; the system automatically adds further information to the data record, which makes it possible to do detailed document searches based on various criteria at a later date.
- Users can also find keywords in documents (some of which are very extensive!) using the integrated full-text search.
The DMS also helps when creating new documents. For example, if a customer’s signature is needed, employees first create the individual document using DocuWare’s form function and then, in a second step, forward it directly to a customer by email. The previous process of filling out different Word templates and then printing them out is no longer necessary.
Several workflows are also controlled by DocuWare. For example, when a letter needs to be authorised by their financial managers.
Our print volume has been considerably reduced by using DocuWare. We didn’t do the exact math but have most certainly saved several hundred trees in this way.
In this case, the responsible employees are automatically informed of upcoming tasks, can then open the corresponding documents with a mouse click, and quickly approve them with digital stamps.
Results
Retrieving information has become much easier thanks to their DMS. Instead of searching for hours in the paper archive as in the past, documents are now retrieved on screen within seconds. In this way, enquiries from external institutions can be answered quickly – for example, when a customer’s declaration of consent must be submitted to the tax authorities for verification.
Thanks to extensive search features, employees can perform even complex document-based analysis and evaluations in a time-saving manner. For example, full-text searches only filter out those documents from the archive that match a customer profile with specific criteria.
At the same time, DocuWare makes it easier to comply with data protection regulations (GDPR). In the past, documents – of the paper, email, and digital variety – were stored in different file cabinets or server drives. Today, a central document pool for everything ensures compliance with all regulations with the help of detailed access rights.
In the past, we sometimes had to spend several hours in our filing room searching – often without ever finding the documents we were looking for. Today, retrieving a document is a matter of a few seconds. With all this time saved, our team can now focus more intensively on customers. In the long term, this means higher revenues for our company as a result.
Kunal Patel | Deputy Money Laundering Reporting Officer (DMLRO)