Seeing through the data jungle

According to Groos, digitization starts today for everyone and affects all industries; it is a top management issue and requires employees with a strong change mentality.

The focus of digitization strategies is on absolute user and data centricity. Creating clarity in the data jungle was the motto of this year's cuAcademy by Circle Unlimited in May 2017 in Hamburg.

The management forum for SAP-integrated document and contract management welcomed business and IT decision-makers as well as IT experts from all industries and partners to the Lindner Park-Hotel Hagenbeck.

Expert presentations and best-practice reports, as well as plenty of space for users to share their experiences, were what the participants took away with them after the two days.

Testimonials

Florian Beck, Knauf Information Services, spoke about the implementation and consolidation of contract management. He addressed the challenges, the migration to the central enterprise system and the benefits.

He summarized these as follows: more transparency, easier access to contracts, compliance and audit security, improved control over dates and deadlines, and full integration with SAP systems.

Chocoladefabriken Lindt & Sprüngli had set itself the goal of defeating the proliferation of data in the HR department through digitization. In his presentation, Manuel Henkes presented the introduction of the digital personnel file in the company.

More than 3,000 personnel files are now managed with the Circle Unlimited solution. According to Henkes, one of the most important challenges was defining the processes to be mapped with the file.

Among the advantages he mentioned were the simplified search and retrieval of documents and data, location-independent access to them, and SAP integration.

Expert presentations

A central theme of the event was the evolution of the electronic signature with the aim of simplifying and accelerating processes.

The eIDAS Regulation and the challenges of cross-border recognition were also in focus, as were the implementation options in contract management.

In contract management, one presentation was dedicated to the topic of classifying and inventorying contracts in accordance with IFRS 15 + 16. SAPUI5 as a new species of target group-oriented user interface was also presented.