For more than 40 years now, geiger BDT GmbH from Bergisch Gladbach has been advising tax firms on IT and strategic issues. Tax consultants can outsource their entire IT to geiger. With individual IT solutions, geiger ensures that its clients can fully concentrate on their actual work.

The services are well received: From 2008 to 2018, the company increased its turnover tenfold on a sustained basis. For meanwhile about 700 tax law firms, geiger forms the heart of the IT landscape, another 600 law firms work closely with the service provider on an irregular basis in strategy projects. Where 18 employees were formerly employed, there are now over 110 salaried employees.

This has reached a level that made other work processes necessary: “Processes change rapidly as the tasks grow”, says Alexander Haunschild, head of sales at geiger, “we could no longer rely on our memory and gut feeling to the same extent as before”. You also need a system that can be used on the move.

A combination of the CRM system Salesforce and the document management system d.3ecm of d.velop AG quickly turned out to be the ideal solution. And this is how it turned out:

An alternative to the storage costs of Salesforce

“We had a patchwork quilt in the software landscape,” says Alexander Haunschild, “we wanted to get away from that.” Some processes required employees to use many different systems and applications. For the onboarding of a new customer alone, employees had to use up to four programs. Much of this only worked manually or via e-mail.

The desire was to leave this fragmented IT landscape and switch to a unified system. This system should not only be able to manage digital documents, but also enable digital processes and workflows. After a short orientation phase, the IT specialists decided to use Salesforce. Thanks to the modern CRM system, geiger got the “patchwork quilt” under control.

But the installation of Salesforce also had its disadvantages. All data such as documents, technical documentation, contracts and customer correspondence should have been stored in Salesforce. Haunschild: “However, since the storage costs for Salesforce are exorbitantly expensive, we were faced with the problem that our workflows etc. run in Salesforce, but the required information carriers such as PDF files, customer mails etc. could not be provided there for cost reasons”.

Document management system made in Gescher

“d.velop AG is ‘made in Gescher'”, says Haunschild, “it has extremely extensive experience in the market and is an owner-managed company. We pay a lot of attention to consistency, which is why we liked it immediately”. d.velop can also score with the scope of services of the document management system d.3ecm at geiger.

“With the help of the ingenious integration of the d.3ecm in Salesforce, we were able to solve the high storage costs”, Haunschild describes, “all relevant features of the d.3ecm fit seamlessly into the user experience of our Salesforce user, so that he can work intuitively with the software without having to learn how to handle separate applications”. geiger also estimates that manual data transfers are no longer necessary, which reduces the possibility of human error. All required information is available to an employee in his leading system (Salesforce).

Technologically, geiger now does not store the enormous amounts of data in the expensive Salesforce storage, but in the d.velop database. Haunschild: “We are talking about a hybrid cloud architecture in which we combine the advantages of both worlds, namely on-premise and public cloud.”

Use: Process more tickets per week

Geiger is of the opinion that if a user has to operate different programs, then better unconsciously. “d.3ecm in combination with the Salesforce integration fulfills exactly this expectation,” says Haunschild. Besides the structural arguments such as the cloud strategy and the good usability, d.3ecm convinced geiger with functions that make the daily work routine easier.

The management of digital documents is the core of the service. Service requests and their administration, support requests, contract changes and all data of a ticket as well as e-mails, drawings, diagrams and PDFs are all available in the d.3ecm and are also available for all employees on the move.

For users, it feels as if they created a process in Salesforce. Physically, the data is located in the d.3ecm. Geiger can now get all information relevant for the service via the document management system of d.velop AG. The system shows which processes are currently relevant and who is processing what. Gone are the times in which geiger had to rely on long, confusing e-mail chains, in which possibly even an attachment was missing.

The result, says Haunschild: “We save time and nerves, and the customer benefits first and foremost. Just by keeping the information better, filing it more easily and accessing it more easily. The customer notices that things are running more tightly, more precisely, and more organized. Information reaches the place where it is needed faster. So we can process more tickets per week.”

User only needs to think in Salesforce logic

d.3ecm itself runs on the servers of geiger and could be configured quickly. “geiger could go live within two weeks”, describes Dennis Reese, product manager at d.velop AG. Alexander Haunschild confirms: “The interface and the integration were set up within a very short time, as if in no time at all”.

The user interface is based on the current tasks. “The d.3ecm displays context-related information, projects and documents within the Salesforce interface. In each case, those that make sense.”

This means that the user only has to think in Salesforce logic. Optimum usability of software is a point that is becoming increasingly important alongside the scope of performance and functions. It is not for nothing that products which are as intuitive and comprehensible as possible in their usability are so commercially successful. Examples of this are Apple, Google and the Adobe software family.

“The advantages are obvious”, says Ozan Sevinc, Business Partner Manager at d.velop AG, “the user no longer has to open a new tab, no second window, no parallel structure”. Users can save around two hours of work time per day that they would otherwise have spent searching for information.

d.3ecm extends functionalities of Salesforce

With d.3ecm, Salesforce users can research documents via full text search. When filing, d.3ecm automatically keywords the documents. Moreover, it serves for a clean and audit-proof filing with process optimisation and digital workflow. All services of d.3ecm can be displayed in Salesforce.

After the installation, geiger employees only took a few hours to get used to the operation of all elements. Service employees can now search for an error number via full text search and find out whether a colleague has solved this error before. Haunschild: “d.3ecm belongs to the central nervous system of the company.”