Tradition Takes a Modern Turn
Just like the Hofbräuhaus in Munich, the spa found in the town of Bad Brückenau is owned and operated by the state of Bavaria. The State Tourist Office is in charge of running the show, including core tasks like the spa’s events and managing its properties. A central document pool is making their workflows faster and more transparent.
Initial Situation
Ornate historical buildings nestled harmoniously within elegant Baroque parks, are the legacy of King Ludgwig I of Bavaria one of the spa’s most well-known guests, and are visible wherever you turn. But while it may look like a fairy tale, the Bad Brückenau Spa is a very real business that has been attracting guests to its healing springs and bath landscape for over 250 years. Known both as a top medical center, as well as a modern vacation destination, it is well-positioned for success in today’s market.
The Tourist Office’s tasks include the operation and maintenance of the spas and events offered with other private operators. They also track a special spa tax that is charged for each of the 240,000 overnight stays per year along with fees paid by day-guests. And last but not least, they manage the real estate properties which contain numerous historical treasures that belong to the free state of Bavaria.
For the organization and administration of all these various tasks, the Tourist Office depends on modern IT. “To keep up with the times, we decided to implement a Document Management System (DMS),” reports Andrea Schallenkammer, Director of the Bad Brückenau Spa.
State Tourist Office – Bad Brückenau Spa
Industry:
Administration / Tourism
Location:
Bad Brückenau, Germany
Applications:
Management, Accounting, HR, Guest Information, Baths & Lounge, IT/Tax, Nursery, Marketing/PR, IT, Events
Document Types:
Correspondence, authorization / payment orders, inquiries, AR/AP invoices, accounting records, designs, laws, press articles, statistics, contracts, QM documentation, personnel documents, plans, guest requests, booking confirmations, regulations, templates
Initial Situation
Whether it’s contracts, regulation compliance forms, invoices or documents for managing events and guest facilities plus all their related correspondence – they have a large volume of documents. Every month, it amounts to about 5,000 documents (some of which contain hundreds of pages). These are all read, processed and stored. Many have to be completed chronologically as part of a workflow. Several departments need to have access to the documents.
In the past, the records were all collected and placed in binders for retrieval near various workstations, before they were ultimately relegated to the Royal Kitchen in the Main Hall’s cellar. Long search times for older documents were especially tedious – no one enjoyed a trip to the dank cellar! New legal retention requirements meant that their paper archive was quickly at capacity and it wasn’t possible to add on. For this reason, the Spa’s Director opted to make the switch to a central digital archive: “Our long-term goal is a completely paperless office. Every employee should be able to access the central document pool and be able to quickly retrieve everything they have authorization for.” After looking at several products, they chose the system with the best price performance ratio: DocuWare.
Solution
Since October 2012, DocuWare has been in use at Bavarian State Spa at Bad Brückenau. The Spa’s Director, her second in command, as well as 15 employees from various departments – including Accounting, IT, Guest Information, Property Management, Technical Department for the Baths, and even the Nursery – are actively using the system. To best accommodate the software, their server was expanded by 600 Gigabyte and a second monitor was added to the workstations of individual employees. With the help of DocuWare Printer, the applications they had been using previously (such as the ERP system WINLine, a specially developed solution for their spa administration called Prokur, and Microsoft Office) were all seamlessly integrated with the archive. Documents generated by the other applications are stored right into DocuWare via print functionality. Even various email, which employees write or receive, are centrally stored according to special rules. Incoming paper documents are labeled with a barcode, scanned and immediately stored in the document pool. Within three months their digital archive had already grown to 15,000 documents. And it’s all accessible via Web Client – from anywhere and at any time.
Benefits
The benefits of the system were quickly enjoyed in the daily work of the Bad Brückenau Spa. The biggest bonus of their DMS project, according to Schallenkammer, was that multiple employees could tap into important documents at the same time and without long search times: “Important processes are flowing more quickly and are noticeably improved,” she adds. For example, as part of their distribution of incoming mail, they set up ancillary workflows. Other paper documents, like notifications of new changes in regulations or governmental decisions, are often quite important for various employees to see and sign off on. In the past, they had folders that snaked their way between offices. Today, after a document has been scanned and stored in DocuWare, a distribution workflow is launched: the document then immediately appears in the task list of all affected employees. They then register that they have read through the document by adding an electronic stamp. Once the stamp is added, the document disappears from their task list.
A similar workflow was set up for authorizing invoices. As a state-run business, the Spa’s administration must fulfill all strict financial requirements of the Bavarian state, and so invoices must be authorized for payment according to very specific rules. In general, five employees are part of the authorization process. With the help of electronic workflows, this process was truly revved up. While they used to manually move records from desk to desk, now they automatically show up in an electronic basket of the next employee in the workflow. Here they can be checked over on the monitor before the status is then changed with an electronic stamp. Invoices move at a rapid clip for payment and booking. Even departments like the Nursery, which aren’t housed anywhere close to the main administration building, are easily integrated into the digital processes with DocuWare. It’s also simple to see where an invoice is in the chain: the Accounting Department can see with a mouseclick who still needs to add their stamp, for maximum transparency.
Conclusion
The Spa’s management has profited from the central storage of all their documents and complete correspondence, including email. “Everyone has immediate access to the information they need at that moment,” says Andrea Schallenkammer with satisfaction. This saves a ton of time but it also has other benefits. For example, the Spa’s Director can access important documents from a meeting or while traveling right on her notebook and can view important email exchanges to see the latest status of a project. They plan on regularly expanding the DMS going forward. “We want to get better and better, to best serve our guests and business partners,” emphasizes Schallenkammer. Next step: the Spa’s administration plans on adding DocuWare in the area of Quality Control. Looking to the future, the organization’s IT Director, Dirk Döppert, also stresses the valuable know-how of their Authorized DocuWare Partner: “From the outset, we felt very supported and are convinced that the next project steps will also be met to our fullest satisfaction.”
