Smeg’s ambitious digitization project

We needed a support in our growth

Our business has been growing by 20% every year for the past 4 years. The French subsidiary’s workforce has grown from 55 in 2015 to 76 in 2019. This means more and more sheets of paper and documents to process. We were therefore looking for a solution that allows us to digitize all these paper documents while keeping the track on actions to be carried out. Our fast expansion has also led to greater demand on our staff. We wanted to simplify our co-workers work while still meeting customer needs. Creating an online workspace that provided easy access to business relationships’ documents was becoming essential. We wanted to make some of our processes more professional. And we knew that digitization would increase savings.

Open Bee made our objectives reachable

Improving the customer follow-up process

Our goal is to make 80% of customers use Open Bee (the remaining 20% are already using EDI). In the system, we have 100,000 documents. We want to keep eliminating more and more paper. This large-scale project takes several years, we will succeed in doing something good. In the very short term, we will add the workflow module to improve the customer follow-up process. Everyone will have the same information in real time. Workflows will also be used to approve supplier invoices by the Accounting department; we plan to increase productivity and smooth document management. Open Bee is also used for the Reliable Audit Trail.

Organize documents around keywords

By the end of the year, we want to manage dynamic links between files and the search engine to easily find documents related to an order, which SAP does not do. Other European subsidiaries of SMEG are interested in developing a similar tool… And the strength of Open Bee is to have a solution translated into several languages!

• Improving business processes
• Access to real-time information
• Lower costs when sending customer invoices

Great benefits come fast and numerous

We wanted a solution that allowed us to do both DMS, workflows and archiving, while opening it up to our external sphere. We decided to give priority to customers and to give them the choice of digitization.

• Today, 30% of them use Open Bee, which already means a paper saving of 50% for SMEG.
• We used to print 200 invoices of 2 to 3 pages a day. In addition to paper, this allows us to reduce operational costs (e.g., ink) and postal charges. We also get rid of the loss of documents.
• We used to have someone who was in charge of printing and papering customer invoices every day and full-time. Today, she saves 50% of her time to focus on other tasks.
• Customers are also delighted as some people contact us to thank us for putting in place these kinds of tools. The Open Bee solution is beneficial for them as well as for us!