All about CoCos

Your department is called "Content & Collaboration Service" – CCS for short. Who 
or what is behind that?

In principle, today's CCS department is the result of merging the Sycor ECM team and the SharePoint team. Thanks to the merger, our department bundles competencies and experience in the areas of document-intensive business processes, archiving solutions, and the structured and more effective collaboration of teams. Our goal is to improve business processes through digitalization or, to put it more concisely, we optimize customer processes and simplify collaboration.

How do you improve these customer processes?

When content in the sense of documents is involved, we offer in part highly customized solutions in cooperation with EASY SOFTWARE AG. EASY is a leading ECM software provider for midsize enterprises and has been our premium partner for years. We successfully offer archiving solutions from the SAP and Microsoft Dynamics divisions as an additional service for our ERP customers.

We have established a close partnership with the ERP provider ORDAT from Gießen. With Sycor.Archive for FOSS and Sycor.Invoice for FOSS, two user-friendly 
archiving and invoice processing solutions have been created in the course of cooperation. Documents such as orders coming from the ORDAT's ERP system FOSS are archived in EASY, or the invoice is recorded in EASY and reconciled with the master data.

We work closely with Microsoft in the collaboration field. This is backed by the Gold Partner status since 2012. The SharePoint technologies from Microsoft make day-to-day business significantly easier for our customers, since they can map processes more efficiently and ergonomically. As indicated by the term "collaboration", the focus 
here is on teams and locations working together, both in the B2C and B2B sectors. In the SharePoint environment, we are a founding member of the "Major League SharePoint" of VOI (voice of information), a consortium of product suppliers and project consulting firms with the goal of realizing straightforward, effective business applications on the basis of Microsoft SharePoint with a focus on midsize enterprises. Strategically, we count on both custom solutions and established partner products.

How does your content and collaboration service simplify day-to-day business for our customers? Do you have some practical examples?

Invoice management, for example, deserves mentioning in terms of content. A modern invoicing process for instance looks like this: The invoice arrives in digital form, for instance as a PDF attachment to an e-mail, and is scanned automatically. Relevant invoice content such as the vendor, quantities, and prices are compared to the master and movement data in the ERP system (SAP, Microsoft Dynamics). The system checks whether there is a purchase order for the invoice. Payment is triggered automatically if a match is found – known as automatic posting. More complex processes can of course be integrated, such as approvals for certain invoice amounts. In the meantime, these approvals are also possible from mobile devices such as a smart phone or tablet – whether I am currently at the office or sitting in my yard. Archiving sounds dusty; ECM, digitalization, and Future Workspace on the other hand are fit for the future, practical, and save lots of time. In case of invoice inquiries, all users with access authorization can search the digital archive from anywhere – not just in a ring binder in accounting office 123.

In the collaboration field for instance, we implement modern intranet solutions for companies, or innovative knowledge management, e.g., teams from four different locations working together on one document. It does not have to be sent back and forth numerous times, but is centrally stored in one location where everyone can access it. Everyone who works on it automatically creates a new version. File endings such as "Final" and "New" are a thing of the past. These days it is particularly important for companies to be able to respond more quickly, effectively and flexibly. Information and documents are crucial for this.

Through detailed knowledge of customer processes, we support several pharmaceutical groups – for example with their special event management processes – based on our many years of CRM expertise.

Do you serve a specific clientele?

In principle, our customer solutions apply across industries. We serve midsize customers, primarily in the DACH region, With one exception: in the collaboration segment, we work for large corporate groups in the life science sector. Here we develop highly specialized pharmaceutical industry solutions.

What can we do better than our competitors?

We are able to support and advise our customers effectively from the outset. For example, many customers have already installed SharePoint, Skype or other programs but don't really know how they can combine these technologies effectively and efficiently. We do! Our team compiles the requirements and develops an overall concept in cooperation with the customer, allowing the customer to prepare a long-term strategy. In addition to project implementation, we also offer support and hosting for the customer along the entire value chain as a full-range service provider. That is something Sycor does better than many others in the midsize segment.

Thanks a lot for your time.