Customer stories

document management successdm-drogerie markt GmbH + Co. KG

Major international omnichannel retailer enhances collaboration with OpenText™ Content Cloud™ and OpenText™ Content Management for SAP® Solutions

document management success

About dm-drogerie markt GmbH + Co. KG

dm-drogerie markt GmbH + Co. KG is an international health and beauty omnichannel retailer with approximately 4,000 stores across 14 countries in Europe. In Germany alone, the company serves more than two million customers every day.

dm-drogerie markt retail store
  • Revenue:
    €17.7 billion
  • Employees:
    89,100
  • Stores:
    4,000
  • Based in:
    Germany

Summary

Challenges

  • Boost the efficiency of document-driven business processes.
  • Improve collaboration by eliminating information silos.
  • Strengthen sustainability by reducing the use of paper across the business.

Solution

  • Accelerated innovation with cloud-based document management.
  • Leveraged best practices from OpenText Professional Services.
  • Modernized the user experience and improved productivity.

Results

  • Managing 80 million documents efficiently
  • Cost savings magnifying glass Digitizing one million documents per year in store
  • actionable intelligence brain Boosted staff productivity with digital workflows
  • actionable intelligence brain Enabled effective international collaboration

Challenges

  • Millions of business documents scattered across multiple siloed repositories
  • Difficult and time-consuming to find important information
  • Manual document management processes reduced employee productivity

With thousands of stores across Europe, health and beauty omnichannel retailer dm-drogerie markt understands that great customer service starts with satisfied, engaged employees. For that reason, dm empowers its 89,100 employees to work independently, be proactive, and take responsibility.

Employees play a key role in decision-making—and actively contribute to improving the company. To help create opportunities for innovation, dm gives its back-office teams in the centralized business departments the chance to gain valuable working experience in its stores.

Meike Weber-Keßler, product manager enterprise content management at dm, said, “For me, it was highly rewarding to have the opportunity to work in a store. I gained valuable insights into the challenges of document management processes across our stores and our centralized business departments. If we could automate these processes, I was confident that we could increase staff satisfaction and enable higher productivity.”

In the past, dm collected distributed paper documents such as delivery receipts and supplier invoices from its stores in Germany every week and delivered them to the company’s headquarters. There, a team manually sorted and distributed the documents to the appropriate departments for further processing. When archiving documents in the company’s SAP business systems, back-office employees often needed to re-type meta data about the documents to make sure all the important data was available when needed.

As part of a wider digital transformation effort, dm was preparing to consolidate multiple SAP ERP instances across its international businesses to a single, global SAP Retail solution to pave the way for the next-generation ERP solution SAP S/4HANA. In parallel with the SAP transformation, the company focused on modernizing its document management and archiving capabilities.

“Quick and easy access to documents would benefit the entire company—from in-store teams to product and quality management specialists,” said Meike Weber-Keßler. “We looked for a modern document management solution to help us consolidate and streamline the way we store and access millions of documents across the business.”

 

dm dialogicum building

Using the OpenText solutions integrated with SAP Retail, we’re now digitizing one million documents per year directly in our retail stores. Automating document capture and management saves us a lot of time, eliminates business process delays and cuts down our CO2 emissions.

Meike Weber-Keßler
Product Manager IT Product Enterprise Content Management, dmTECH GmbH / dm-drogerie markt GmbH + Co. KG

Solution

Working with OpenText Professional Services, dm deployed a company-wide enterprise content management solution powered by OpenText Content Management for SAP Solutions and OpenTextT™ Core Archive for SAP® Solutions on OpenText™ Content Cloud.

Products deployed

Services provided

Accelerating innovation with cloud-based document management

dm recognized that a cloud-based solution would enable it to modernize its document management capabilities while reducing maintenance and management workload. With OpenText Content Management for SAP Solutions and OpenText Core Archive for SAP Solutions—running on OpenText Content Cloud—the company can deliver a modern user experience with a flexible web interface and integration with SAP Fiori mobile apps.

First, the company rolled out the new solutions in Germany. “The OpenText Content Cloud solutions were a great match for our cloud-first strategy,” said Meike Weber-Keßler. “This helps us to use our internal IT resources more efficiently and adopt new features and releases faster, giving us more opportunities to innovate.”

Leveraging best practices from OpenText Professional Services

Working with OpenText Professional Services, dm leveraged FasTrak Migration and FasTrak Move & Modernize services to accelerate the deployment process. Offering purpose-built tools and accelerators, FasTrak Services enabled the company to take advantage of industry best practices from OpenText.

To increase efficiency and automation, OpenText Professional Services helped dm to streamline processes by setting up import and management workflows for various document types and connected systems.

“We greatly value the expertise that OpenText Professional Services brought to the migration and continue to work together to further streamline our collaboration and improve overall service quality,” said Meike Weber-Keßler. “We also enjoy being part of the community of OpenText customers. OpenText arranges regular events where we can all learn from each other, share insights and become more productive together.”

Modernizing the user experience and improving productivity

To make the most of the new cloud solution, dm worked together with an OpenText partner to build customized dashboards and reports tailored to meet the needs of its product and quality management teams.

“We can now help our employees to track relevant activities in one place and stay on top of key tasks,” said Meike Weber-Keßler. “To break down information silos, we’re empowering our teams to drag and drop content-related email conversations directly into OpenText Content Management. And the powerful full-text search is essential to quickly find relevant information.”

dm used the implementation to rethink some historically grown folder structures, eliminate redundant and duplicate data, and establish a single source of truth for critical documents. As the company rolls out the solution to more of its teams, it plans to simplify collaboration using business workspaces, which will make document sharing easier and more flexible.

Team collaborating on a content management project

By continuing our partnership with OpenText, we expect to further improve the efficiency across the entire group. We also want to use cutting-edge generative AI technology such as dmGPT to automate more tasks and unlock productivity improvements.

Meike Weber-Keßler
Product Manager IT Product Enterprise Content Management, dmTECH GmbH / dm-drogerie markt GmbH + Co. KG

Results

dm has consolidated over 80 million existing documents on a single platform, enabling faster access to business data. Using digital workflows, the company is now digitizing one million new documents a year—replacing manual, paper-based work.

Managing 80 million documents efficiently

Working closely with OpenText, dm migrated its business data into the cloud and now manages 80 million documents with a total data volume of 38 TB on OpenText Content Cloud. The solution delivers high security, availability, and data protection in compliance with data protection regulations in Germany and across Europe.

“Our cloud migration was a large and complex project,” said Meike Weber-Keßler. “Working with OpenText Professional Services and a consulting partner, we completed the migration and modernization project on time and within budget—a substantial achievement for everyone involved.”

Digitizing one million documents per year

dm has used the OpenText solutions to drive its digital transformation, completely reimagining the way documents are managed across its 4,000 retail stores in Germany and other countries such as Austria, Slovakia, Czechia, and more. For example, retail teams now use an SAP Fiori mobile app to capture documents such as delivery receipts and invoices, which are stored and managed in the cloud. As well as eliminating the need to physically collect and process paper documents, automated information extraction and document classification make business data immediately available to back-office teams.

“Using OpenText solutions integrated with SAP Retail, we’re now digitizing two million documents a year right at our retail stores in Germany and the other countries we operate in,” confirmed Meike Weber-Keßler. “Automating document capture and management saves us a lot of time, eliminates business process delays and cuts down our CO2 emissions. Sustainability is an important priority for us and this implementation has a real, measurable impact on our environmental footprint.”

Boosting employee productivity with digital workflows

By standardizing on a single document management platform, dm is replacing manual processes with automated digital workflows that make many tasks easier, faster and more efficient.

“For our product and quality teams, many things have become easier,” said Meike Weber-Keßler. “Our employees can now collaborate on documents in the cloud and the status of everyday business tasks is transparent to the whole team. This ensures that we can respond to requests swiftly, while avoiding duplicate work and removing the need to coordinate and discuss details via phone or email. Comments and revisions are immediately visible to every member of the team, which eliminates the challenges with working independently on documents.”

Enabling effective international collaboration

In the coming years, dm plans to roll out the OpenText solutions to all 14 of its international business units while building new digital workspaces and workflows in OpenText Content Management for SAP Solutions.

Teams across our various centralized business departments are already excited to explore all the new possibilities that come with closer international collaboration in the cloud,” concluded Meike Weber-Keßler. “By continuing our partnership with OpenText, we expect to further improve the efficiency across the entire group. We also want to use cutting-edge generative AI technology such as dmGPT to automate more tasks and unlock productivity improvements.”

How can we help?