PROCESS IMPROVEMENTS
M3 established a new organisation to receive incoming tasks and dispatch them to the right service for their treatment. Document processing time was quickly reduced threefold.
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Ask an expertM3 is one of the leading real estate agencies in the French-speaking Swiss market, specialised in real estate sales, management (rental, refurbishment) and projects. Founded in 1950, M3 is based in Geneva and Zug and has almost 100 employees with a representative office in London.
M3 manually managed a huge amount of paper documents for its customers, mainly contracts and invoices. Their processing required several treatment steps with inherent risks of information loss and a long execution duration.
M3 sought to improve processing of these documents in order to deliver better services to its customers.
Business process formalisation and re-engineering.
Ensure business user adoption of final solution.
Integration with the existing Information system.
Deliver an "expandable solution" with a quick and clearly identified return on investment.
We designed a solution based on two components: one to capture paper documents and a second to store and secure the sharing of electronic documents.
The capture element is a combination of three Kofax products: Kofax Virtual ReScan captures and cleans scanned documents; Kofax Capture classifies and recognises structured documents; and Kofax Transformation Module indexes unstructured documents, such as numbered payment forms (known as BVR in Switzerland). With these components the solution automatically classifies and separates documents, recognises and indexes them by zone, validates BVRs through algorithms and exports textual PDF files to the storage part. During the treatment, operators are able to perform quality control to complete document validation and indexation.
The storage part of the solution makes use of Alfresco’s ECM product. Its aim is to store and secure electronic documents centrally. Alfresco applies automatic document classification and security based on the data extracted from the scan. Business users access documents through a dedicated application directly integrated with Alfresco.
We organised the project by proposing an incremental roadmap strategy. First, we started with the most valuable documents to demonstrate solution value. From this, we involved other company departments with their own document types. Today the solution treats more than 300,000 documents per year.
M3 established a new organisation to receive incoming tasks and dispatch them to the right service for their treatment. Document processing time was quickly reduced threefold.
Each contributor only accesses documents related to his activities. Documents are now linked to the business process and shared with the appropriate person. Moreover, team managers are able to centrally monitor team activity.
The quality of the information has been improved by creating a unique version of each document. The contributor refers to a single point of entry that remove the risk of information loss.
It is easy to copy or lose a piece of paper. With our solution users can now access documents easily and store them securely.
The solution is flexible and directly managed by the internal IT team. They are able to provide new features, especially on Alfresco, which is increasingly used as the front end interface to manage all of the company's electronic documents.