Productivity soars at Konica-Minolta France

Konica-Minolta, a printing equipment manufacturer, wanted to optimize the contract management process at its French subsidiary, improving its reliability as well as customer satisfaction. Seventy employees at Konica-Minolta’s French subsidiary work daily on contract administration, processing 2,000 contracts—new ones or renewals--each month.

With 20 percent growth in its core business since 2010, Konica-Minolta wanted to enhance the entire contract management process, from data entry to billing. At the same time, the company was prompted to overhaul its information system to become more agile and responsive. The company adopted an SOA architecture and broke down its information system into smaller, easily maintainable components.

Faced with the decision of developing its own process management system or adopting an existing product, Konica-Minolta selected Bonita Open Solution from BonitaSoft, a provider of open source business process management software. Explaining the choice, Franck Inglebert, head of development at Konica-Minolta France, says, “A lot of the products available today are closed, which makes it impossible not only to develop new connectors but also to control the older developments. What’s more, we were looking for a Linux-compatible solution with excellent ergonomics and a graphic modeling approach, as well as an extensive range of connectors. Bonita Open Solution met all of these requirements.”

According to BonitaSoft, the workflows created or taken over by its solution at Konica-Minolta are designed to check the compliance and consistency of contracts, and to accelerate contract creation and approval. The automation process involves Konica-Minolta’s staff of technicians, sales representatives and retailers, as well as contract management personnel.

Xavier Riehl, head of information systems, sales administration, development and quality at Konica-Minolta, lists the benefits gained from the new system. “By doing away with paper and our manual processes, we have boosted the reliability of our processes based on our company’s rules,” he says. “We also have end-to-end traceability ... This puts us in line not only with regulatory compliance obligations but also with our own quality standards. We have seen a spectacular jump in our productivity; a new contract, which was traditionally approved in four or five days in the past, can now be approved in under an hour ... Overall, our contract process capacity has increased by 30 percent.”