Polimex-Mostostal – Contracts under Full Control

In an engineering and service-oriented organization focused on serving challenging and demanding sectors such as petrochemicals and power construction, efficient access to information during complex business processes is crucial for business success. Appropriate document management tools within the company, which on one hand shorten access time to necessary information and on the other ensure its secure processing, are a key element of Polimex-Mostostal’s strategy for increasing efficiency.

The growing number of documents in interactions with suppliers and clients, the complexity of their handling, the need for efficient approval, and the ability to access the document circulation history for a given matter became the direct reason for implementing an ECM-class tool, one that combines document repository functions with a workflow engine, and also guarantees secure and efficient electronic document flow throughout the entire organization.

The solution covers contracts where Polimex-Mostostal SA acts as a service provider or seller, as well as contracts where the company acts as a service recipient or buyer. The system also handles the circulation of addenda to existing contracts. As a result of a business analysis conducted jointly with All for One Poland, all contracts managed in Rockawork have been divided into appropriate types, including categories such as executive contracts, service agreements, and confidentiality agreements.

In Rockawork, for each contract, in addition to individual attributes describing it and enabling full-text search across the entire contract database, documents have been created to organize and document their preparation, analysis, and circulation process.

As a result of the pre-implementation analysis, the contract management process was reflected in a graphical map, defining: user roles in the process, user tasks in the Rockawork system, contract handling stages, and documents created during the process. The process map serves as the basis for managing the entire application supporting the contract circulation system in Rockawork, including change management. Thanks to the acquired competencies in the knowledge transfer process, Polimex-Mostostal is able to independently create new document types and configure the content management repository for its own business needs.

The entire solution is tightly integrated with the SAP ERP system. Integration includes: retrieving contractor data from SAP with automatic data population for contracts in the document repository, retrieving project data from the SAP system, including descriptive project information from SAP, and retrieving order data in SAP.

The contract management process in Rockawork can be divided into several main stages: creation and registration of a new document, review, preparation for signing, and finally, archiving a scan of the signed document.

During the registration of a new contract, Rockawork automatically creates a contract review card, and after it is filled out by the person initiating the process, it checks (validates) the completeness of all information necessary for the document to proceed to the next stage in the workflow. Individual process participants from relevant organizational departments successively carry out their tasks related to contract management. The solution monitors the sequence and automatically creates subsequent tasks.

Tasks generated by Rockawork are group tasks; therefore, during the validation stage, opinions in individual departments are provided by those who first take on a task from their task list. If tasks are not undertaken, the system reminds users of the need to address the document and handles escalations according to defined business conditions (rules). ECM also allows for communication between process participants. All agreements and decisions are recorded in the document’s circulation history.

Upon completion of agreements, the contract is printed and presented for signing to all interested parties. Selected users are informed that the contract is entering the execution phase. Finally, in scanned form, the document returns to the system where it is archived. The contract will be linked to the relevant project in SAP PS.

In addition to reducing the time required to gather information about a given contract, Polimex-Mostostal has also achieved a number of other benefits. One of the most important is access to a set of analytical data, ranging from statistics tracking to full process reporting. Before the implementation of Rockawork, obtaining quick and complete information about a specific contract with a given supplier or in a particular project took significantly more time than it does now, as it required numerous arrangements conducted through traditional communication channels. Thanks to Rockawork, all information about sought-after documents (including their circulation history) is now immediately visible to authorized users.

Proprietary cloud-based solutions are ISO 27018 certified for SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions. BeeOffice, Rockawork, and Edistrada are developed at Enterprise Software House and offered based on the secure infrastructure of All for One Data Centers. The ISO 27018 certificate provides an independent guarantee of the security and confidentiality of customer data stored in applications. The ISO 27018 standard covers processes such as: data backup and maintenance systems, data encryption, application change management, user and administrator activity logging, and user account and permission management. The ISO 27018 certificate extends the scope of BCC’s existing Information Security Management System, which complies with ISO 27001.

Rockawork provides a complete, consistent, and secure cloud document repository, accessible at any time for every user. Process security and blocking unauthorized access to business-sensitive information are ensured by an extensive permissions system, allowing for flexible configuration of views and assignment of access rights.

After implementing Rockawork, document handling arrangements began to take significantly less time, and users work more comfortably because the system manages information from several IT systems required to process contracts in accordance with procedures. The company is gradually reducing the number of paper documents related to contracts in circulation. Ultimately, their complete elimination is planned. This will help reduce risks associated with potential delays (e.g., due to unavailability of personnel) or human errors. Financial savings and pro-environmental actions are also not to be overlooked.

Describing contracts using (any) attributes allows for easy reporting of all information in a structure that facilitates and accelerates business decision-making. Thanks to Rockawork, the contract repository has also been organized by organizational units – documents are unambiguously assigned to individual operational cells and visible only to authorized personnel.

The solution enables the migration of archived contract resources to the new solution, making both current and archived contracts accessible from a single tool.