PDF Notes Domino

B Braun has gone live with a PDF archival system for legal compliance of procurement process using IBM’s Domino and Primeapple’s DominoPDF.

Ronald Krawinkel of MBS, a Lotus Premier partner and a Primeapple partner in Germany shares his experience in managing the project.

B Braun is a 2.7 billion-euro health care business headquartered in Germany with 29,000 employees and 50 subsidiaries around the world. B Braun (www.bbraun.com) has gone live with a PDF archival system for legal compliance of procurement process using IBM’s Domino and Primeapple’s DominoPDF.

MBS Business Solutions (www.mbs-gmbh.de), a Lotus Premier partner and a Primeapple partner in Germany did the consulting and integration for B Braun.

MBS is accepted in the German market for their expertise to implement technology solutions using IBM technologies such as Lotus Domino, Websphere Process Server etc.

Braun is known for its adherence to processes in each and every service they provide. Other than the client facing processes, Braun follows documented processes in internal operations.

One of the business needs was to automate the process of internal procurement. Each and every investment the company makes in procuring goods goes through a set of approval processes. Recent legal changes required each of the procurement workflows to be traceable.

There are various kinds of documents and systems involved in the workflow, which made the archival a complex task. Workflow and decision making notes are recorded in Lotus Notes documents and supporting documents are available in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Word Perfect, Tiff etc.

Traceable archival system for compliance requires a workflow binder containing a PDF of all documents, attachments and Domino documents.

MBS created a workflow system which automates the process of internal procurement and related decision-making and archival of each procurement workflow for legal compliance.

Workflow was implemented using Lotus Domino. DominoPDF was used to automate the archival process for compliance.

They evaluated different products and solutions for the purpose and finally selected DominoPDF. DominoPDF makes it easy to convert all documents including Microsoft Office files, Tiff , Notes Documents etc. to PDF all at the server side without any user intervention.

The project was successfully implemented and the application has gone live at B Braun.

About the Author

Ronald Krawinkel is a Domino expert and a Project Manager at MBS.