Noventiq (formerly Softline) Automates Document Management for Gulliver Group

Softline Holding plc began trading under the brand name Noventiq after divesting part of its business in October 2022.

Gulliver Group unites the Gulliver supermarket chain, the Pobeda (Victory) retail chain covering 26 regions of Russia, as well as office departments, 2 logistics centers, 1 transportation company, and the Fabrika Kukhnya (Kitchen Factory) in-house production facility. Business growth is inevitably associated with an increase in the number of contracts, and last year, the company's management needed to reinvent and automate the content management workflows in the corporate departments. Softline has become a partner in the project implementation.

The project team needed to accelerate document development and handling, improve the labor discipline of employees by automating the document management processes, and minimize human error by reducing the number of mistakes in documents.

For the purpose of business optimization, the provider's experts offered the customer to implement the DIRECTUM RX system. One of the advantages of the platform is that it offers many out-of-the-box modules and solutions that not only automate records management, but also digitize staff workflows, increase the efficiency of collaboration on contractual and commercial documents, enable paper-free document interchange with counterparties, and ensure the legal validity of these operations.

During the project, Softline helped the retailer automate the due diligence audit, negotiation of contractual documents, and organizational, administrative, and regulatory document management. DIRECTUM RX was integrated with 1C, Run Retail, and Active Directory systems.

All inbound contracts are automatically exported into the system and outbound contracts are created from ready-to-use templates in just a few clicks. Contracts and supporting documents are bundled into a single package. The system can automatically select appropriate contract templates and use an intelligent recognition engine to systemize the incoming documents and populate the electronic cards automatically. The enterprise content management system uses preset settings to point out noteworthy facts and highlight various risks with separate markers to simplify the search.

As a project result, Gulliver Group's contract management has become digital. The service supports 43 types of contracts, 27 types of addendums, and 52 approval rules. 7,000 documents have been already entered into the system, and 885 employees have been granted access to it. Every employee approves documents with an electronic signature that they receive when they join the company. All information about counterparties is stored and updated in cards. The content of these cards always remains relevant, and they store the entire history of relations with a specific partner.

"It's important for any organization to streamline the contractual processes as they impact the quality of relationships with partners and counterparties. The larger the business is, the more documents its employees have to process every day. When this process is manual, the risk of errors and approval delays inevitably increases. New tools of DIRECTUM greatly simplify the preparation of draft contracts and related papers, enabling the business users to track all stages of approval and sign-off, search for documents, and keep all records in a single system. This way, the work becomes manageable and predictable, and the business becomes more efficient,"—said Polina Duikova, head of Softline's EDMS/ECM department.

"Some time ago, we used registers in Excel as simple ECM tools. As the document flow volume and the company's geographical coverage were growing, we realized that we need more advanced automation tools. The solution from Softline fully corresponded to the business requirements. Some processes were developed from scratch and tailored to the specific needs of our company. We also highly appreciated that the issues were not resolved formally based on a template. The solutions were always accompanied by in-depth analysis, consulting, and assistance in tackling the arising difficulties. Gulliver definitely plans to develop the system in several directions. First of all, we plan to implement a qualified signature for electronic document interchange with counterparties and integrate it with 1C:ZUP (Salary and Staff Management) to adopt the electronic staff management,"—comments Elena Dolgova, project manager of Gulliver.