A printing company goes paperless

Introduction

Kyocera Document Solutions South Africa is a country level subsidiary of Kyocera Document Solutions Inc, a global company offering a full suite of business applications and consultative services.

Kyocera’s extensive business applications enable a total document approach to achieving increased workflow efficiency, enhanced employee productivity, minimised environmental impact and significantly reduced operating costs.

Challenge

Until 2014, Kyocera Document Solutions South Africa had been sending out more than 3500 manual invoices to clients at a cost of about R12.04 an invoice.

Aside from to the cost and tedium of this process, the company was concerned that the manual distribution of documents would be in contravention of impending privacy requirements set out by regulatory bodies such as ISO27001, SARS, Protection of Personal Information Act (PoPI) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

.Using South Africa’s postal service often resulted in delays in clients receiving their invoices, if at all.

These considerations, in addition to the fact that Kyocera prides itself on being ahead of the curve in terms of innovation and reduced of environmental impact, spearheaded the company’s decision to adopt the technology and processes to achieve digital transformation.

Solution

As an initial step, Kyocera Document Solutions South Africa conducted an assessment of the existing process, measuring the costs involved in terms of human hours and price per unit.

After a thorough investigation it was decided that the solution lay in implementing an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system, which mapped out and digitised the invoicing process.

Conclusion

The successful implementation of the ECM system spearheaded a desire for Business Process Optimisation and Automation across Kyocera Document Solutions South Africa. Employees in all departments began asking: “What can we do to improve our processes?”.

The ECM was employed to allow approvals via mobile, which increased overall productivity and began to foster a more mobile workforce.

Kyocera’s path to digital transformation has subsequently been adopted in other areas of the business, including:·

• HR documents and processes (leave, loans, overtime et cetera) 
• HR onboarding
• All paper-based forms were digitised and follow a workflow process
• Employee travel inquiries
• Employee claims
• Invoicing and credit requests
• Internal stock shipments
• Pricing approval requests
• Fixed asset forms