336% ROI: Total Economic Impact™ study reveals benefits of modern ECM in manufacturing

Manufacturers hold onto their documents longer than almost anyone. A gear unit sold in the 1970s can still be turning in somebody's plant, and the day it needs a spare part, someone has to produce the original assembly order. That’s why many manufacturers are increasingly adopting modern enterprise content management (ECM) systems with built-in AI and automation capabilities.

Doxis (formerly known as SER) commissioned a Total Economic Impact™ study, conducted by Forrester Consulting, into the value of its platform at SEW-EURODRIVE. The manufacturer builds gear motors, servo motors and the drive electronics behind everything from bottling lines to cable cars, with around 21,000 employees worldwide. The results were significant.

But first let's understand what was happening at SEW-EURODRIVE that prompted them to modernize document management and process automation. They faced several challenges, with the main issue being the reliance on manual processes for archiving and managing data production and engineering documents. This had effects downstream, impacting delivery downtime, regulatory compliance, manual processes and effort, collaboration across globally distributed teams, data quality and more.

The scale gives a sense of the problem. SEW-EURODRIVE handles around 250,000 assembly orders a year, and at the time its drawing and microfiche archives were still decentralized across locations.

The administrative workload created a need for additional staff, and previous attempts with ECM systems had yielded limited success. The systems existed, but they simply weren't connected to each other, which is a common problem in the manufacturing industry.

SEW-EURODRIVE needed a solution that would streamline document management, improve collaboration, and enhance overall operational efficiency. What's more, they wanted to achieve data visibility, faster processes, consistently reliable delivery and improve employee experience.

SEW-EURODRIVE experienced a transformative journey with Doxis, resulting in cost savings and benefits exceeding €17m. The Total Economic Impact™ study reveals how SEW-EURODRIVE accomplished this:

• Streamlined collaboration: More efficient document management, allowing for easy creation, updating, sharing, and collaboration. For a manufacturer that covers CAD drawings up to A0 size, company standards, assembly and manufacturing instructions, parts lists and safety regulations, versioned automatically and reachable across 30 countries. Sales, design and assembly teams work from the same order record for a given job.
  
  
• Productivity gains: Automated content-centric workflows, saving 70% of their time in year 1 and 95% in years 2 and 3. These are the routings that used to wait on someone noticing, such as a change request going out for approval or an order confirmation moving through its checks. Note the saving grows rather than levelling off.
   
• AI-enabled productivity: Leveraged AI to extract key elements from incoming orders and inquiries, significantly reducing manual effort. SEW-EURODRIVE uses intelligent document processing to handle 750,000 incoming customer documents a year across multiple languages and formats, routed straight into SAP.
  
  
• Cost savings from legacy systems and staffing: By discontinuing legacy ECM systems and avoiding additional staff hiring, SEW-EURODRIVE achieved significant savings. Worth noting that this was the smallest of the four benefit categories Forrester measured, well behind the value of simply connecting the information.
  
  
• Reduced hardware and maintenance costs: An on-premises deployment allowed SEW-EURODRIVE to cut down on hardware and maintenance expenses.
  
  
• Ongoing management and development cost savings: By effectively scaling the use of Doxis, managing global roll-outs, and developing new features, SEW-EURODRIVE achieved considerable cost savings. The platform now serves 6,100 users in 37 countries.

One of the critical success factors for SEW-EURODRIVE was their ability to conduct lightning-fast searches across decades of historical data, providing valuable insights that were previously out of reach. This was made possible by utilizing the AI capabilities of Doxis.

Decades of historical data carries more weight in manufacturing than in most sectors. A gear unit sold in the 1970s can still be running in somebody's plant, and when it needs a spare part or a service call, someone has to produce the original assembly order. SEW-EURODRIVE found that assembly orders dating from 1959 to 1992 were still being retrieved around 20 times a day, which is why it went back and digitized four million documents out of ageing microfiche. In manufacturing, retention is a service capability as much as a compliance obligation.

The manufacturer now achieves better overall insights, which improves decision-making and increases transparency. Not only that, but AI-enabled processes and document management speed up overall processes and reduce the need for manual data verification.

SEW-EURODRIVE's Group Manager of Archiving and Documenting Services emphasized the importance of AI in their operations, stating, “It would be really hard to do this without AI.” The reverse holds too. The AI had something to work with because the content was already reachable and sat in the context of the order it belonged to.

SEW-EURODRIVE was also able to streamline collaboration and document management, make significant productivity gains, save on costs from legacy systems and staffing, reduce hardware and maintenance costs, and cut back on ongoing management and development costs.

As investments in ECM solutions continue to grow, manufacturers can look to SEW-EURODRIVE's success story as inspiration to embrace modern solutions that drive digital transformation.

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