Challenge
De Lage Landen is a global provider of leasing, business and consumer finance solutions, including vendor finance and factoring. With asset-based financing programs, they help their customers grow market share, enhance profitability and achieve strategic goals.
De Lage Landen has used ITP for more than ten years. Started small, its use grew unchecked until 2008. Then, Rens Voogt, the new global team leader of Enterprise Document Services at Corporate IT, was confronted with more than 2,000 templates, some too complex. “Over the years, we had been building exceptions on copies of exceptions, and the extensive features of ITP allowed building business rules in individual documents. We focused too much on what ITP can do instead of what we exactly wanted to use it for, and even more, what we do not want to use it for.”
Read about the solution
Solution
Documents have been simplified tremendously, improving their manageability. Change management, especially smaller changes, now only takes hours rather than weeks of analysis and planning. Having moved a lot of business logic from the templates to the source applications, the document generation process not only significantly reduced design and build time, but also run time. “Where a certain monthly batch process started off with a 48-hour duration, smarter redesign and better interfacing with the ERP system reduced it to less than five hours,” Voogt stated proudly.
The most important milestone has been the establishment of a Document Board where many disciplines participate proactively. Legal, marketing, operations, commerce and IT all own pieces of document elements and work together to set corporate standards for customer correspondence.
Measureable results? By far, this is found in acceleration in time to market. By reducing complexity and increasing reuse, the same number of people can deliver results faster, and often at better quality, which ultimately leads to higher business volume and lower total costs per generated document.
Read about the implementation
Implementation
“We started to push business logic back out of documents and back to the source applications like the ERP system and other front- and back-office systems. As an example, a VAT number must be provided by the originating application and should not be calculated by ITP during the generation of a document. From good governance perspective, it is key to manage and control data in a ‘single source of truth’” Voogt explained.
The former document generation silos for specific applications in the front and back office have been replaced by three process-based service offerings: batch, on-demand and interactive. This has been a logical consequence of a service-oriented approach, and thinking about the business and designing solutions accordingly.
