Success Story DEKRA

DEKRA-Documents as proof of safety

The name KEMA-KEUR dates back to a time when KEMA Quality was a division of consultancy and research firm KEMA N.V.  Since 2009, KEMA Quality has been part of DEKRA. All testing, inspection, auditing and certification activities of the former KEMA Quality now constitute an integral part of DEKRA's service catalogue. In the Netherlands, KEMA-KEUR is a term synonymous with safety. Certificates issued are pure securities, and all related documents and correspondence on the matter are of the utmost importance. 

The question

As IT manager Remco Mol has been actively involved in the choice for ITP and the consecutive implementation in 2006: “We earn our money by providing documents, so we have to go the extra mile and make sure you have everything in perfect order.”

Quality assurance is a top priority and therefore the IT department supports only one output application with a minimum number of templates. This way, all quotations, invoices, certificates, reports and letters have as much a uniform look as possible, with guaranteed quality. No matter where in the world they are sent or supplied, from the Netherlands to Japan, all documents are centrally managed and maintained. The IT department in The Netherlands manages all systems worldwide. Part of those have been developed in home, others have been purchased.

The solution

For DEKRA, the choice was clear: ITP from Aia Software met the requirements of central management and high quality of output. All documents created by DEKRA, both internal and external, are produced with ITP. It guarantees the quality and makes the management comprehensive.

Mol indicates that DEKRA adheres to one key underlying principle: “We always view the production of a document as part of a work process - never as a stand-alone activity. That means all of our work processes in the various applications launch ITP when a document comes into play. Thus, the IT landscape has been set up so that ITP is interconnected with all of the business applications like a spider in a web.”

DEKRA offers a broad range of services with a large number of product testing. Nevertheless all quotations are created based on the same template and a large number of text blocks.
“The same is true of the tool we use to register our certificates. The details to be registered are entered and the user just clicks a button to generate the actual certificate. Using ITP in Digisign is certainly a special feature. It is a tool that we have developed in house for the digitally signing of documents: ITP receives a document, applies a signature and then creates a secure PDF file from it. In addition to this, the invoices are created from the project files and a polling batch job runs to check if any new invoices are ready, and then passes the details to ITP. These invoices are either printed or sent to internal customers by email. Finally, we also use ITP to send different types of emails, like internal emails to auditors.”

The result

Isabella Roosenboom is responsible for model building and maintaining templates at DEKRA. She is actually the one and only central ITP user in the large DEKRA organization. She literally sees all changes pass het desk and she personally supervises the fine-tuning, in terms of content, legal issues and sales.
“Using standard templates makes the management for me pretty easy and comprehensive. The text blocks have been programmed with IF and ELSE, which combined with the templates has resulted into a very elegant solution. We will definitely look at the new version of ITP because the text block management functionality will simplify the work quite a bit and offers new possibilities. We use many different languages and especially for countries like China and Japan it would certainly be nice if users could apply changes themselves.”

During DEKRA’s acquisition of KEMA Quality, the level of convenience provided by ITP quickly became apparent when all of the documents had to change names and corporate style. It was relatively quick and easy to convert all of the documents that were saved as ITP templates at that time. Of course, some other changes were made to the documents as well but mostly it was a matter of applying all changes at the same time from a single location, in a centralized template (a kind of master template). This very tangible benefit of using ITP has resulted in more and more other departments switching to interfacing their document output with the centralized ITP system. DEKRA’s future will be all about growth and expansion and ITP will play a key role. New business units can be integrated more quickly if all required documents and certificates are created in an efficient and centralized manner.