One central data hub for all business-critical documents

"Document management with technical structures" is the credo of Alois Hörl, IT Team Lead Business Application. The company's CAD data management tool, Autodesk Vault, has proven itself for managing product data. But it does not cover the whole area of order-related data: quotations, orders, invoices, correspondence, documentation, protocols, process-describing Excel lists, contracts. The plant builder therefore manages these in PRO.FILE as its central DMS solution.

A consistent DMS concept along the entire value chain

For Hörl, the DMS solution has a decisive advantage over conventional DMS or collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams and SharePoint: because it is at home in the production world, it can manage BOM-like structures. On top of that, at Scheuch the software integrates all non-product documents from any adjacent system - from SAP S/4HANA, from Microsoft Office and Outlook, from the in-house sales tool for creating quotations and calculations, and much more.

The plant builder has thus realized an end-to-end DMS concept in which PRO.FILE, as the central hub, brings together business-critical data from a wide range of IT systems, makes it available to authorized users, and finally archives it audit-proof. With growing international business, Scheuch's supply chains are strongly international as well. The PRO.FILE DMS provides an efficient, productive infrastructure at every stage of the value chain. It was installed and integrated into the existing system landscape by trisoft.

"Most PLM vendors believe PDM plus an ERP coupling already makes a product lifecycle management," explains trisoft managing director DI Herbert Schlacher. "PRO.FILE goes far beyond that and includes all company- and business-related information, not just ERP data."

Representing complex structures in PRO.FILE

"In PRO.FILE we can represent structures similar to assemblies in CAD," is how Hörl describes working with the DMS. Under an "order" folder, any number of subfolders for orders, quotations and more can be created and linked automatically. "Structures like that cannot be represented automatically with conventional DMS," the IT team lead emphasizes.

A quotation folder, for instance, collects all documents created during the quotation process: e-mails, cost estimates, technical design data. If the quotation becomes an order, the quotation folder is closed and automatically attached beneath the newly opened order folder. The nesting of folders is joined by a second benefit: the high degree of automation within the structures. Scheuch manages incoming documents such as invoices and delivery notes with PRO.FILE as well.

Automated incoming document processing

For incoming documents, the OCR software IRISXtract™ for Documents is used to scan invoices and delivery notes, for example. The data of the captured documents is then reconciled with the orders in the ERP from within IRISXtract, validated, and handed to PRO.FILE together with the scans.

Today, 90 percent of incoming documents arrive by e-mail - the document already exists digitally. Scheuch exploits this automation potential with tri.fetch, the mail fetcher developed by trisoft: e-mails including attachments are retrieved at a defined interval from a mailbox set up specifically for invoices and delivery notes and handed to IRISXtract automatically, where the data reconciliation begins. Finally the e-mails are moved to an archive area, where they are kept in case questions come up.

Reliable takeover of legacy data from the file servers

The straightforward takeover of legacy data into PRO.FILE was another plus for Scheuch. For this, trisoft developed a statistical procedure with fuzzy logic that transfers hundreds of thousands of documents into the new DMS practically overnight, with high keywording quality. With a hit rate above 90 percent, order-related, unstructured legacy data was imported from the file systems, keyworded correctly, and made available for later research and processing.

For researching the filed documents, Scheuch uses trisoft's browser-based product triView. Employees can query the DMS from any system at any time without leaving their familiar main application. A buyer, for instance, works in the order overview in the ERP and can display all orders or other documents belonging to the order from PRO.FILE via triView at the push of a button.

Business correspondence increasingly runs by e-mail, at Scheuch too. Back in the day, the company replaced its Lotus Notes system with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. In the course of the legacy data migration, trisoft separated the e-mail archives stored as NSF files in Lotus Notes and transferred them into PRO.FILE. Users could then research every single old e-mail on a business transaction through the DMS. At the time, this saved the Scheuch Group expensive storage on the Exchange server, which was also relieved because it is now used only as a transport and authoring system. Essential e-mails from Outlook are still archived in the DMS for documentation today.

About the Scheuch Group

The family business Scheuch has set itself the goal of contributing sustainably to protecting the earth with air pollution control technologies. For more than half a century, the Upper Austrian company has worked on lowering particulate and pollutant emissions in the industrial sector and on reducing noise and odours. Extraction, dedusting, conveying, flue gas cleaning and plant engineering: as a plant builder, the company covers the entire range itself - sales, project management, design, research and development, manufacturing, assembly, commissioning and after-sales service. Today the Scheuch Group, with more than 1,400 employees and offices around the world, is regarded as an internationally leading technology company.