OpenText Corp. is bringing one of Canada’s largest trust companies into the digital age.
The document management company will provide the Home Trust Company with software that will automate its scanning and digital filing jobs and integrate closely into SAP ERP system. Receiving more than five millions documents every year, Home Trust eventually plans to become a virtually all-digital shop.
The current process for scanning and filing documents at Home Trust is tedious and time-consuming, said Paul Randlesome a senior account executive at OpenText. Its employees have to scan individual files and enter information manually. Now, with OpenText Extended ECM (an enterprise content management platform) and Capture Center (scanning software with optical character recognition), such jobs can be automated easily.
“Going forward, by using some of the OCR they’ll be able to literally stack a bunch of files on the scanner and let them process through and they’ll automatically be routed to the correct folders,” Randlesome said.
At Home Trust, vice president of operations Dinah Henderson said the integration with SAP’s ERP platform was a “really compelling” reason for choosing OpenText’s products. Looking for a single platform to deploy across the organization, the company had converted to SAP software last July. OpenText offers very close integration with SAP software, so it was a natural choice.
Henderson said the purchase is “part a process reengineering within the organization” that will make the 25-year old company more efficient in processing its internal loan applications. It will now be less costly to store information and easier to satisfy regulatory requirements. The digitization of the company’s records will take place in several phases over the next 18 months,” she added.
While the technology to scan paper documents is an important part of what OpenText markets to customers, said Randlesome, it’s inevitable that companies like Home Trust will become digital through and through. The OCR, he says, will be an important in the initial stages of HomeTrust’s reengineering, but as the company increasingly does away with paper the integration of OpenText’s content server into SAP will take centre stage. The end goal for Home Trust will be to create a “digital mailroom” where very little scanning is required, he said.
SAP has worked very closely with OpenText over the past few years, awarding the company as a top global partner for four years in a row. Lubor Ptacek, vice-president of strategic marketing at OpenText, said his company has an especially unique relationship with SAP.
“It’s actually one of the great success stories in terms of strategic partnerships, I think, all over enterprise software, because we don’t just partner. SAP actually likes our solution so much that they are re-selling themselves.”