Digital Elektronik initiates the engineering change: product change documentation with PRO.FILE

The system was introduced and adapted to the company's requirements by trisoft - who also supports its continued expansion.

From a well-bounded process to a company-wide system

Angela and Richard Auer founded Digital Elektronik in the city of Salzburg in 1978. Since then the company has grown to more than 450 employees at three sites. As a living company, Digital Elektronik is subject to permanent change. It opened the PRO.FILE chapter in 2017, starting with incoming invoice processing - a well-bounded process that is a good way to get to know the software. trisoft was the implementation partner in this project from the very beginning.

"The software offered us many new opportunities, especially regarding its capabilities as a document management system," explains Dipl.-Ing. Barbara Schmid, responsible for process and organizational development at Digital Elektronik. PRO.FILE was initially introduced as a pure DMS; until then, documents were filed on the network. Two years later, the company also used it to replace the CAD vendor's predecessor PDM system. "The idea of using PRO.FILE as a PDM/PLM solution alongside the DMS promised much stronger integration into all our other business applications."

Directly linked with every part of the company

Unlike the predecessor PDM, PRO.FILE is no longer an isolated tool used exclusively by development - it is in use across the entire company. For Barbara Schmid it is only logical to organize product data management with it too: "Product-related does not just mean bills of materials and drawings, but also commercial documents, specifications and much more. Employees from all departments must be able to access them at any time, and that works best when everything is filed in one system."

Half of all employees work in the DMS

To that end, trisoft coupled PRO.FILE tightly with the PSIpenta ERP system. Delivery notes, outgoing invoices and order documents are filed in the DMS automatically when printed from PSIpenta, along with MCAD/ECAD documents from SolidWorks and Eagle, customs papers from non-European transport, and work instructions and safety data sheets from production. The latter can then be called up by production employees at terminals. By now, 230 people from all departments have access to the information managed in the DMS.

Invoice processing now runs fully digital

Incoming invoice processing changed substantially and sped up considerably with the introduction of PRO.FILE and the document capture system from I.R.I.S. Before, the process was heavily paper-driven - even invoices arriving as PDFs by e-mail were printed out. Today an OCR engine captures the invoice data from the incoming PDFs - paper invoices have become rare - and forwards it to PRO.FILE. "There we form different stacks for invoice review: those that can be posted straight through because an underlying order exists, and those that need review," explains Barbara Schmid.

Invoices with no underlying order in PSIpenta are created directly in the accounting system, posted, and closed in PRO.FILE. Above certain value thresholds, management approves them directly before posting. Through the PSIpenta coupling, order-related invoices are filed straight from PRO.FILE for reconciliation with the order data in the production planning system and, if there are no quantity or price deviations, forwarded immediately for posting. Around 30 percent of invoices require review; three quarters of those reviews are waiting for the inspected goods to be booked in, and only a quarter are actual quantity and price deviations.

The goal is a guided, controlled change process

In close coordination on the individual process flows, trisoft and Digital Elektronik adapt the system to the company's individual requirements - from day one until today. It is an ongoing project to advance the "engineering change" in the company: a guided change process is being introduced with PRO.FILE step by step. The first step was to document, with system support, the changes employees were already making in the system, reducing the additional manual effort for transparent and traceable product changes. This stage has since been completed.

"We use PRO.FILE documents to capture change requests and requirements for our products," says Barbara Schmid. "Which end-of-life parts have to be replaced? Does that require a customer release? Based on these documented requirements we decide whether a change should be carried out, and we store change documentation in the system for traceability."

As of October 2023, close to 1.8 million documents were already managed in PRO.FILE, with more added continuously.

About Digital Elektronik

Digital Elektronik develops and produces electronics, mechanics and the accompanying software as an integrated whole and has been a specialist in digital device manufacturing for more than 40 years. The company's products are used in parking facilities, casinos and operating theatres, among other places - whether at 600 m altitude as the lighting of the world's largest clock in Mecca or as a sensor system for high-precision drives. Performance, quality and longevity always come first.