Success Story De Lage Landen

De Lage Landen: document governance is essential

About De Lage Landen

De Lage Landen is a global provider of leasing, business and consumer finance solutions, including vendor finance and factoring. With asset-based financing programs they help their customers grow market share, enhance profitability and achieve strategic goals. De Lage Landen aims for long term relationships with customers and partners. More than 5000 members in 35 other countries  make all the difference..

The challenge

De Lage Landen is using  Aia-ITP for more than 10 years. Started small, its use has been growing and growing until it ran out of control in 2008. “This was not caused by the product itself, but more due to the way we were using it”, says Rens Voogt, global team lead Enterprise Document Services at Corporate IT. Taking over the lead, he is confronted with more than 2000 templates, often too complex.  “Over the years, we had been building exceptions on copies of exceptions and the extensive features of ITP allowed building business rules in individual documents.. We focused too much on what ITP can  do instead of what we exactly want to use it for, and even more, where we do not want to use it for.” Due to the unmanaged proliferation of complexity and volume, a lot of time and effort was required to deliver new projects and changes. A blind alley with a bad name.

The solution 

“We started with involving the business users in the solving the challenges in the document generation domain. Emphasizing a stronger position of the already existing Document Board, change control was implemented at the front door. Concurrently we started with cleansing the repository by 15%, removing unused documents. “In fact a repetitive process that we run regularly”, continues Rens. “More importantly we started to push business logic back out of documents and back to the source applications like the ERP system and other front- and backoffice systems. As an example, a VAT number must be provided by the originating application and should not be calculated by ITP during the generation of a document. From good governance perspective it is key to manage and control data in a ‘single source of truth’.”

Other improvements have been to make documents more versatile by replacing many document elements into variables. For instance, all fixed company data in document headers and footers are no longer programmed as fixed text, but as variables with a context driven feed from a database. Parameterizing documents reduces and simplifies the maintenance. Moving an office location now only requires a single change of a database entry rather than adjusting text on multiple documents.

We also looked for ways to consolidate document templates. “For a certain process we were sending multiple documents to single customer about the same contract. With a few smart changes, we were able to retire some templates; less correspondence, less tracking and follow-up, less chance on errors and less archiving needs. Overall we are realizing a significant reduction of effort and costs”.

Rens Voogt: “At the end of the day, this has less of a relationship with documents, as it has with business process redesign. We follow a similar course of business alignment with the service we provide to our partners. In the past we had to manage an extensive portfolio of exclusive documents; different logo’s and formats, complying to each individual partner’s wish. Nowadays we deliver a solid, reusable service of standard document templates, which meets all business and legal needs, and still allows for a limited but well-considered set of options for specific branding and customizations. Flexible, yet in control.”

The result

All efforts have resulted in a new service delivery model. The former document generation silo’s for specific applications in front- and backoffice have been replaced by three process based service offerings: batch, ondemand and interactive. This has been a logical consequence from a service oriented approach, thinking about what business we are in and designing solutions accordingly.

“This  new architecture also enabled us to challenge ánd facilitated the Aia document developers to work together on implementing best practices, identifying further improvements and updating documentation” continues Rens Voogt. “Not only did this lead to a more consistent service delivery, the developers themselves started to cooperate even more intensively, as a true international team, which resulted in more knowledge sharing, proactive behavior and versatile employment. Our partnership with Aia Software in this area has been very positive: they have actively participated by co-designing and investing in this new way of working.”

Documents have been simplified tremendously, improving their manageability. Change management, especially smaller changes, now only takes a number of hours rather than weeks of analysis and planning. Having moved a lot of business logic from the templates to the source applications, the document generation process did not only significantly reduce design and build time, but also run time. “Where a certain monthly batch process started of with a 48 hour duration, smarter redesign and better interfacing with the ERP system reduced it to less than 5 hours”, stated Rens proudly. “We have made huge steps in increasing the pace of project implementations and we better equipped to handle possible changes.”

The most important milestone has been the establishment of a Document Board in which many disciplines participate pro-actively. Legal, Marketing, Operations, Commerce and IT all own pieces of document elements and need to work together to set the corporate standards for customer correspondence. 
Measureable results? By far this is the acceleration in Time-To-Market. By reducing complexity and increasing reuse the same number of people can deliver results faster, and often at better quality (less defects), which ultimately leads to higher business volume and lower total costs per generated document.

Next steps

In the long run De Lage Landen is aiming for establishing  Document Lifecycle Management, in which document creation, collaboration, distribution and retention get together and will be managed integrally. “Documents are often the start and end of  primary business processes and therefore equally deserve vision and strategy”. On short term Rens Voogt expects that ITP will replace a number of  existing legacy solutions and that document standardization will go global. This is fully in line with the desire to further increase and professionalize the level of Customer Correspondence.
At this moment, the Enterprise Document Services department is working with the Facilities department to assess possibilities to optimize processes  regarding outputmanagement and -distribution.
“We want to make the documents traceable by applying barcodes or QR-codes, making it easier to recognize and process them as incoming correspondence. We are also looking at various outsourcing models: where feasible we like to contract out standard processes. , because this will enable us to focus our proposition on important and special business challenges with clear added value, And one special challenge is to allow business users to manage the content of designated document text blocks all by themselves”. Working together with Aia Software on an exemplary implementation of  ITP CCM Interactive is therefore one of the top priorities on the wish list of Rens Voogt.