Contemporary offices just got a bit smarter

Coor SmartArchive is a powerful, scalable physical and digital document management service. Coor has a proprietary platform for customers who want secure and intelligent digital archiving, called Arkinet. Arkinet is a tried-and-tested cloud based archive solution that was produced back in 2001. Over the past year,  Cecilia has noted growing interest in digital archiving.

“While the technology has been in place for some time, the interest hasn’t really got serious until recently. There was also long-term skepticism about cloud services, which has eased in the past few years. More people are now seeing the benefits of cloud services, which means that all development and application management is embedded, and customers don’t need to invest in upgrades and management of different systems.”

The services in Coor SmartArchive are in continuous development, a process largely controlled by customer needs. The combination of digital signatures with e-archiving solutions is a new function. e-signatures involve the creation of a document in the e-archive, and then sending it to the intended signatory. After signing, the document becomes searchable, which means it’s never lost and is traceable right through its workflow.

Cecilia Björndahl thinks good archiving solutions contribute to good control. She highlights the three main benefits of Coor’s e-archive:

• Control over agreements
  One advantage of the SmartArchive system is that it is linked to business process management so that there’s an alert when agreements are due for expiry, and other significant events. Money can be saved in monitoring agreements when it’s time for price indexing, for example.
• Role based
  If a company is reorganized, the system works if people change job. In these cases, the replacement gets access to the right documents, with responsibility at the right cost centre.
• Customer specific
  We own and develop the system in-house and can develop functionality by listening to our customers.

Unlike its competitors on the market, Coor can combine the document management services in Coor SmartArchive with other services, like Coor’s reception services. This enables us to streamline end to end in the chain, from managing physical mail and archiving, to scanning and digitalizing, thus creating customer benefit.

“Many of our assignments involve us taking responsibility for managing and scanning agreements or invoices. It’s so simple for the customer if documents to be archived and digitalized can be dropped off with a receptionist instead of being sent to a dedicated department. Through the receptionist, we can take responsibility for archiving original documentation securely, and then also send scanned files to our proprietary e-archive, Arkinet, or to the customer’s archiving system,” explains Cecilia.

Rapid digitalization and the change of document management has created consequences that sometimes aren’t discovered until it’s time for a physical relocation, for example.

“A lot of companies employed an archivist 20 years ago, but not any more. And this competence has been lost. What do they have in their filing cabinets, and what do they need to get rid of? We have extensive knowledge and experience of archiving, and can help establish control. We can impose a structure jointly with the customer, while simultaneously helping them review and streamline their own processes,” continues Cecilia.

Coor uses Coor SmartArchive itself to manage and store HR documentation, supplier and customer agreements Nordic wide. Because this solution is scalable, it fits small or large corporations. Smaller customers may only be interested in physical archiving for a few tens a month, while a large corporation may require complete solutions for managing extensive documentation volumes. One example is northern European telco TeliaSonera, which has appointed Coor to manage most of the document management in its customer service operation.

It's not unusual for customers to pilot the concept on a small scale, with our partnership then growing.

"Those customers we start up with sometimes have an urgent need to retrieve documents quickly, but when we get the opportunity to show what we can do, our assignments often expand. Often, this may involve 20 users initially, but soon, there are 100 more. The growth is brisk,” concludes Cecilia.