Speeding up Processes with Digital Personnel Files

The decision to digitalize all employee documents began in Spring 2014. SERIS’ requirements consisted of compliance with labor laws, cost reduction, the improvement of human resources (HR) business process and using technology as a marketing avenue to create a competitive advantage from being one of the first companies using digital personal files in HR. Their HR database provides the employee list through an interface. Documents and metadata are stored in the content management platform Nuxeo.

SERIS evaluated six different solutions and deployment options for on-premises, in the cloud or totally outsourced. Ephesoft responded to their RFP and conducted proof of concept tests, and was selected as one component of the total solution. “We wanted not only to digitalize but also to receive metrics out of our documents. Therefore, it was key to extract the relevant metadata, especially validity dates, out of our employee files,” pointed out Philippe Kervoëlen, Directeur Général Délégué Support at SERIS. “It was apparent that Ephesoft provides a reliable capture platform based on supervised machine learning to automate the processes of sorting documents per employee, per type and requiring metadata depending on document type.”

The contract was signed mid-October 2014 and the complete system was installed by February 2015. After a testing phase and the configuration of the different document types, the rollout of the solution to field offices started in May 2015. All offices were operational by July 2015. Today the solution is used in SERIS headquarters and in every field office where security agents are managed. The introduction to system users was simple due to the browser-based user interface, which provides easy access.

During the first operation, an unexpected challenge occurred: many users were used to scanning documents and dealing with them later. This behavior caused a queue in Ephesoft, backing up more week after week. Once the issue had been detected, our Ephesoft partner reacted quickly by limiting the life cycle of a document in the queue to three weeks. Since the migration to the most recent version of Ephesoft Transact in combination with Linux, the system realized an additional performance improvement.

To onboard their documents into Ephesoft, SERIS uses a scanning solution by several existing multifunction devices from Ricoh combined with shared folders for transferring scan files. Later, to increase productivity, they added individual network scanners.

Now, as soon as an employee has been issued and received an ID in the HR database, all documents related to this employee can be scanned. Ephesoft’s supervised machine learning technology helps identify the diverse types of documents and users can easily validate via the web interface. Users can easily fill in the required information, sometimes with a text recognition feature associated with the document image. After validation, the data is exported into Nuxeo for storage and accessed through third-party applications.

Ephesoft’s Smart Capture® platform has enabled SERIS to digitalize over 10,000 employee files in a few months. SERIS has changed the way people access information about employees – digital data is readily accessible and easy to find and share internally with a streamlined process. Through established metrics for their files, SERIS is reaching a much higher level of data integrity and compliance, which is essential to their security business. Their improved standards make sure all required documents are stored and up to date. From a marketing perspective, this innovative technology is truly a key argument for attractiveness with customers.

“The main advantage is the wholeness tracking – we can do more and we do it better with Ephesoft,” says Philippe Kervoelen. “We are already planning to extend the process to supplier invoices.”