The 2023 edition of AnswerModules User Group, held in Rome last September, was a valuable opportunity to gain insights into how organizations leverage Module Suite in their ECM projects.
Among our attendees, some of our customers and partners shared their experiences and stories. We are immensely thankful for their participation and would like to share the key points of their presentations to those who were unable to join the event.
Vetropack: Product Development Approval Process on Extended ECM
Vetropack Group is a leading European glass packaging manufacturer based in Switzerland. Producing over 5 billion units of glass containers per year, the Group boasts a 100 year-long history and 4 000 people employed across Europe.
Since developing new or customized products required flexible collaboration across all teams and entities throughout the project phases, as well as with customers and prospects, Vetropack’s sales and product development processes were interconnected and highly complex.
As a matter of fact, an optimal IT solution was needed to improve efficiency, reduce errors, ensure compliance with regulations, enhance communication and collaboration, and increase profitability.
The goal was to improve the company’s overall operations and better serve customers, while maintaining a competitive edge in the industry.
OpenText Extended ECM was therefore identified as the ideal enterprise content management platform for this process. However, its out-of-the-box capabilities would have made it difficult to ensure the very high flexibility and UI expectations required to build such a complex solution.
Under the guidance of Kwe.li, its professional services partner, Vetropack implemented an efficient, tailored-to-business solution by combining the standard Extended ECM functionalities with Module Suite’s enhancing capabilities.
By leveraging Module Suite’s capabilities, streamlined workflows were designed, incorporating key business processes while still providing the necessary flexibility to accommodate changing customer needs.
Form-based workflows facilitated seamless communication among all stakeholders, resulting in accelerated sales, design, and order fulfilment process. The workflows were also integrated with related external systems, such as CAD for designs, DocuSign for electronic signatures, and SAP for ERP, to further improve the efficiency and accuracy of the process.
A central electronic repository was implemented to store all digital artifacts related to customer requests, offers, contracts, emails, pricing calculations, and more. This implementation ensured accurate and complete documentation, easy access to all relevant information in one place, and compliance with regulatory requirements, as well as product traceability.
Overall, the transformation process resulted in significant improvements in Vetropack’s business operations. This included a faster sales process, greatly improved planning, and ultimately, more efficient production. These changes enabled Vetropack to better serve their customers and maintain a competitive edge in the industry.
Extended ECM at scale: The case of a European customer leader in the commodity industry
With Extended ECM for SAP, Salesforce, Office 365, etc., content is successfully integrated into the most used leading applications, providing access to information when and where it’s needed, and facilitating automation and navigation across related entities, even across different systems.
However, since the pre-packaged Extended ECM solutions are available only for a small set of vendor applications, every time the customer needed to connect Extended ECM with a leading application or a home-grown solution, a dedicated connector had to be implemented.
Creating new connectors with OScript was time-consuming and required highly specialized skills.
What’s more, Oscript made it challenging to interface with other applications.
On the front-end, WebReports presented its difficulties too, offering a limited set of features and reusability options.
To overcome these challenges, the customer decided to leverage Extended ECM for Everything, the Module Suite functionality that facilitates the connection with other leading applications, making it easier to develop, maintain, update, and test new integrations, all while promoting reusability, adherence to standards, and adoption of best practices.
The fact that Extended ECM for Everything is based on a low-coding approach (Groovy), makes it simpler and faster to create new connectors without the use of Oscript, as well as making it easier to repurpose them for other leading applications. This allowed the customer to structure and standardize the process of creating new connectors, whether they needed to integrate their home-grown solutions or off-the-shelf applications.
Moreover, the Extended ECM for Everything feature helped the customer improve the overall user experience by implementing new features, reports, and processes, while ensuring the highest flexibility among Smart Pages, forms, and template-based widgets.
Interfaces were quickly reusable and extendable to other use-cases, resulting in faster implementation. UIs showed users exactly what users were looking for. This ensured smoother interaction with the platform, as navigation was made incredibly easy.
Since the introduction of Extended ECM for Everything, the customer has been leveraging the functionality across 5 different applications, with 2+ million business workspaces generated. The improved interaction between IT team and stakeholders/content owners helped in build trust in the application and improve the overall productivity.
The case of Italian Group operating in Aerospace, Defence and Security sector presented by Engineering
- Secure Documents Upload
The customer needed a solution to facilitate easy document sharing with external third parties.
However, the organization’s infrastructure and internal security policies posed challenges for enabling external access and collaboration: Every document coming from outside the intranet had to undergo inspection by a Trend Micro DDA tool. This inspection process took up to 5 minutes, causing delays for end-users who had to wait until the upload operation was completed before sharing documents with others.
By leveraging Module Suite’s capabilities, Engineering, the customer’s system integrator, implemented a Secure Upload Solution that could ensure a better user experience, while being compliant with the security policies.
In order to prevent document uploads through various entry points, a Secure Document Upload replaced the “standard” Upload functionality, that was disabled in both Smart View and Classic UI. A “Drop Area” widget was configurated to facilitate document uploads via a designated button or drag-and-drop functionality, as well as intercepting upload requests, encrypting files, temporarily storing them in a local server area, and registering the new upload request in a specialized Audit Table.
At the core of the process, a scheduled Content Script monitored all incoming upload requests. When new requests emerged, the script decrypted the file and sent it to DDA for evaluation.
In the event of a positive outcome, the file was uploaded to the designated folder within Extended ECM. Conversely, if the outcome was not positive, the file would neither be uploaded nor retained, and promptly removed from the staging area.
The Secure Upload Solution made it easy to share documents with external parties and fulfill business requests while securely uploading documents to the platform, in accordance with the company’s high-security policy standards.
- PDF Document Generation
The customer wanted to generate pdf documents from a form – usually located outside Extended ECM (Appworks) – that could be easily stored and archived on Extended ECM and other external repositories.
The PDF generator needed to be dynamic and easily customizable in terms of fields, tables, rows, in order to meet the various different needs.
Engineering relied on Document Builder by Module Suite to create a centralized tool to automatically generate PDF documents, starting from the structured or semi-structured data collected from external applications/system.
Through Content Server Rest API, Appworks sent the .xml file containing the data filled by the user in the form, from which the Document Builder generated the pdf file in the desired format, saved then in Extended ECM. The external application that needed to «consume» the document as well, could fetch the file through REST services.
For more information about Document Builder, check out our Technical Recipe.
