Location: Blackmore Vale and Shaftesbury, Dorset, United Kingdom
Industry: Dairy and Food Processing and Manufacturing
Website: www.bvdairy.co.uk
Founded in 1958 as a family farm in England’s West Country, BV Dairy is now a thriving modern business. Each year, the company purchases 35 million liters of milk from dairy farms within a 25-mile radius of their production facility in Shaftesbury, Dorset and turns them into dairy products for food distribution and manufacturing firms. BV Dairy’s range includes their award-winning Dorset clotted cream, as well as yogurts, buttermilk, soft cheese, and mascarpone.
For nearly 50 years, Epicor Software Corporation has specialized in helping its customers grow their businesses, expand their capabilities, increase their productivity, and improve efficiencies. A leader in enterprise resource planning for medium-sized businesses, Epicor serves as a trusted partner for thousands of companies worldwide across key industries such as manufacturing, distribution, and retail. Through its innovative services and deep industry expertise, Epicor is creating a world of better business for its customers, building in their unique business processes and operational requirements into every one of its solutions – in the cloud or on-premises.
Epicor has nearly 3,900 employees dispersed across 30 countries worldwide. Between an employee’s start and end date with the company, there are numerous records related to hiring, onboarding, performance, benefits, and data changes that all must be maintained securely. The vast majority of these files are paper-based; long-tenured employees may have multiple file folders with as many as 40 documents in each file. All total, Epicor’s human resources documents comprised 10 storage cabinets in its HR file room for the United States and Canada alone.
Epicor had been searching for an optimal solution to digitize these files for more efficient storage, secure access, and retrieval as well as more secure compliance with document retention requirements worldwide. A key requirement was integration with its UltiPro cloud-based system for human capital management (HCM).
When the Epicor HR team evaluated potential document management solutions, they realized many came packaged with extraneous features that Epicor didn’t need. When Epicor acquired enterprise content management provider DocStar in 2017, it gained access to a solution that was a perfect fit.
“DocStar gives us the power to add and retrieve more documents to and from the system. It increases our accuracy, efficiency, and traceability. Furthermore, this solution has plenty of flexibility that lets us tune and tweak workflows as our business processes change and grow. Most of all, the introduction of DocStar has allowed us to streamline processes and save time—notably in terms of invoice approval and delivery note processing—because it brings all of the relevant information and documentation together in one place.”
-Mark Damen, ERP Systems Manager | BV Dairy
“The Epicor Enterprise Content Management tool is very feature-rich. Sometimes a document is requested that has sensitive information that you may not want to share. You can pull up the document, choose what you want to redact, and then send it out in a minute. It saves a lot of time.”
-Debra Ingram, SPHR | Director of HR Operations
Epicor went live with the Epicor ECM (DocStar) solution in September 2020 and quickly began uploading employment offer letters. The letters are an essential starting point for HR recordkeeping as they include information that outlines contractual obligations between Epicor and its employees.
The process of migrating these documents into the Epicor ECM system has been simple. Epicor HR representatives worldwide scanned and uploaded offer letters into the system; from there, they opened the document in a workflow, saved the document under an employee’s number, last name, full name, or any other specifics.
Fielding requests for information is faster and easier than ever before. Previously with hard copy documents, if an employee requested a file, an authorized human resources representative would have to travel to the HR storage area, find the appropriate document, scan and send the document, and save a copy of the communication. Now, documents can be emailed directly from the Epicor ECM system to the employee in a password-protected zip file.
Based on the employee data from UltiPro, including appropriate fields such as Name, ID, Hire Date, Status, Location, and Country, the indexing process for employee documents is very simple and ensures that the document is indexed to those UltiPro values, eliminating data entry for each field. The UltiPro employee data provides a high level of data validation and integrity for each record added to the system. This contributes to more accurate and efficient document search results across all employee records.
“The Epicor ECM tool is very feature-rich. Sometimes a document is requested that has sensitive information that you may not want to share. You can pull up the document, choose what you want to redact, and then send it out in a minute. It saves a lot of time,” said Debra Ingram, SPHR, Director of HR Operations for Epicor.
Individual countries and the European Union have different rules for HR document retention, privacy, and other compliance guidelines. To support these global document management requirements, the Epicor ECM solution was provisioned as multiple Software-as-a-Service sites; one based in the U.S., one in the Ukraine/Russia area, and one in China. Epicor HR personnel have access to one or more of these SaaS sites based on their security profiles and information access needs.
Beyond helping adhere to compliance requirements, the Epicor ECM solution also assists with creating uniformity in indexing documents as there are variances in naming conventions for performance appraisals and other HR documents worldwide.
“Having that uniformity across different geographies with the flexibility to add country-specific elements is a big win,” Ingram said.
Business constraints due to the COVID-19 pandemic limited scanning and upload of documentation to the Epicor ECM repository as many offices remain closed. “Even though we’re just getting started, our success with the Epicor ECM solution has made us realize that we should have done this sooner, as COVID has underscored the need for digitization,” Ingram said. “Once we have everything uploaded, it will make life so much easier.”
“The demands in HR are constant and evolving,” she continued. “We don’t always know what’s going to be coming next week, next month, or next year. So, the more we can lessen the administrative effort required, the better positioned we will be to adapt and respond to the needs of the business.”
