United Biscuits – an OnBase solution Case Study

United Biscuits (UB) had just three months to implement its new financial processing system in India. They couldn’t afford to have any IT hold ups, but the existing enterprise content management solution, IBM Content Manager, couldn’t complete the task at hand without expensive and time-wasting custom coding. With a need for advanced workflows and a tight integration with the SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, UB turned to OnBase by Hyland.

OnBase Content Management

After researching OnBase, the organisation saw it not only met its need to get the new financial processing solution up quickly, but was also far less costly to manage. “We considered the total cost of ownership over five years, including software, services and maintenance costs. What we found was that implementing an OnBase solution would be one-third less expensive than updating the current Content Manager system” said Tony Morrissey, systems manager at UB.
The first step to meeting the three month deadline was a quick and seamless integration with SAP.

API-level integration with SAP completed in a few hours

UB had two main goals for the integration between OnBase and SAP – to create an API-level integration that allowed the systems to communicate back and forth and to convert all of the legacy links from Content Manager to OnBase.

Using OnBase certified integrations for use with SAP ArchiveLink, the integration was completed in less than a day.
“In only five hours, UB had a deep API level solution with SAP that goes far beyond simple screen scraping. To do that with Content Manager would have taken considerably longer” says Morrissey.

Migrating the legacy links also became a simple task. As the organisation imported documents into OnBase, the solution automatically linked to the correct SAP transactions. By meeting these two goals, the solution gives users all the information they need without ever having to leave their familiar SAP screens – allowing them to share information more easily and accurately so they can get more done in less time.

OnBase lowers costs at United Biscuits

The new invoice processing solution brought costs down by enabling outsourcing to India. Additionally, the maintenance costs of OnBase over the first five years were 45% lower than those of UB’s former system, Content Manager.

On top of that, Morrissey and his team spend much less time working on the OnBase solution than they did with Content Manager.

“The best thing about OnBase for me is that I don’t have to deal with many support issues. OnBase ticks away and we don’t have to worry about it. And it gives me time to work with others looking to expand it to other areas.”

Summing Up

OnBase:

• Lowers total cost of ECM ownership by a third: By converting away from IBM Content Manager to OnBase, UB greatly reduced the costs associated with running the solution. With fewer maintenance costs and less time spent on upkeep, OnBase cut UB’s ECM costs.
• Integrates quickly with key systems: With UB under a tight deadline to get the solution up and running, OnBase delivered a tight, API-level integration with SAP in only five hours. This enabled UB to quickly deliver users in India the information they needed to complete their tasks.
• Cuts the workload placed on IT: With OnBase, staff at UB spend much less time working on the solution than it had with its legacy system. OnBase allows IT to trust that they won’t have to deal with nearly as many support issues so they can focus on working with other department to expand the solution’s usefulness.