- Quick retrieval of documents using keywords and document categories
- Simultaneous access to a single document from various company locations
- Seamless integration with the core data of property management (rental address, lease number, etc.) via the service-oriented architecture interface system
- Facilitated property management as documents no longer need to be sent to clients by post or e-mail
- Integration of documents into digital business processes (e.g. invoice approval)
- Significantly reduced processing times for document-based business processes
Digital documents management in the real estate industry
Paper documents are everywhere in the housing industry. More than anything, incoming post is the most difficult to systematize.
The task: How can a Germany-wide property management company access all of its daily documents from each of its locations? Despite most business being conducted digitally, paper documents still play an important role in the in the day-to-day workings of the real estate world. A solution was needed to make file archives as well as documents from the daily incoming post available to all property managers in the company - regardless of their location.
The solution: Jürgen Neumann, Ingo Rau, Iris Rabener and their team decided to implement an Enterprise Content Management system with seamless integration into the existing IT system. Paper documents are centrally digitalised using high-performance industrial scanners and subsequently transformed, fully automatically, into machine-readable text. OCR (optical character recognition) recognises machine-written text, even after being copied multiple times or having been sent by fax. Furthermore, all documents receive a barcode identifier and are indexed by categories such as property, address and lease.
Once digitalised the documents are available as PDFs to all authorised employees as well as to clients. Using a secured internet connection, asset managers at client companies can directly access rental documents and contracts. Tediously searching through reference files is a thing of the past. The daily routine of property management no longer involves paper originals, which are securely stored in file archives. In the event that an original document is needed, the location of the file can be immediately determined using the barcode in the database. Within a few hours the original paper document is at hand.