Ringier ČR forms part of Ringier AG, a Swiss publishing group. Ringier ČR, a.s. has most readers on the Czech market, its newspapers and magazines have over 3.9 million readers. With 34% market share, Ringier is the strongest daily newspaper publisher and leading magazine publisher in the Czech Republic. Its newspapers and magazines include Týden, Reflex, Blesk, Sport, TV Revue, ABC, etc. Ringier has its branches in Switzerland, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Ukraine, China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

Initial Situation

Ringier ČR was interested in:

  • Lowering the costs of physical archiving of documents, which is being resolved by the contractor
  • At the same time, they wanted to completely eliminate the cost of handling already archived document
  • Another goal of the changes was to increase user comfort in the finance department by being able to generate a vendor invoice image directly from SAP

Document archiving solutions          

The architecture of the solution was based on an assignment by Ringier ČR, which envisaged connecting a local scanning station to the Livelink archiving system implemented by Ringier Switzerland in cooperation with OpenText.

The Prague branch of Ringier ČR acquired high-performance Fujitsu flatbed color scanners and Livelink Enterprise Scan software.

Enterprise Scan mainly serves for bulk scanning of documents, processing according to a set scenario (e.g., bar code recognition, etc.) and archiving of documents. Enterprise Scan application was included in the Livelink Imaging package, along with Windows Viewer / Java Viewer applications, etc.

Progress of the process is displayed during the documents processing by Enterprise Scan application.

Each document is provided with a header that displays some basic information:

  • the document order
  • the number of pages in the document
  • the document index that is automatically taken from the barcode

Individual scanned items are automatically sorted into the documents according to the barcodes. In other words, if a barcode is recognized, a new document is created automatically (starting with the header). Enterprise Scan allows users to delete, split, export, and send documents through the web client for further processing.

Kofax VRS (Virtual ReScan) technology was used to improve the quality of scanned invoices. This technology processes the documents on the route between the scanner and the Enterprise Scan application. Its job is to optimize each scanned page with regard to scanner capabilities and the quality of the original. Everything is done automatically and no user interaction is required.

Scanned documents archiving 

Incoming invoices scanned at Ringier ČR are prepared for transmission to remote SAP R/3 for processing and are subsequently stored in the central data repository in Switzerland which has been implemented directly by Open Text.

This happens every time the scanned documents with recognized barcode index are present in the Enterprise Scan workspace. The document archiving process can then start.

Archiving into SAP

It is performed through an OAWD transaction. Further navigation within the SAP system depends on the document type. All scanned documents are removed from the Enterprise Scan workspace after successful archiving to restore the operating capacity.

As further development of accounting documents processing, Ringier considers implementing electronic signature into its archive. It aims at complete cancellation of paper archiving.

For the near future, it also considers extracting the content of invoices after scanning and their automated posting in the SAP ERP system.