As they adapt to the changing world economy, large corporations like Essar Group—an energy and communications conglomerate in India—are looking to improve efficiency by leveraging shared services. To establish shared service centers for business departments across its 55 companies, Essar purchased Laserfiche Rio from Sigma-Tech India Pvt. Ltd., a Laserfiche VAR based in Mumbai.

The Road to Rio

According to Chandresh Sharma, vice president of solutions sales at Sigma-Tech, Essar became interested in Laserfiche Rio after seeing how capably the system would complement Microsoft SharePoint. Specifically, Essar wanted to integrate Rio with SharePoint to establish a shared service center for processing invoices.

A key selling point, Sharma says, was being able to show video examples of how Laserfiche integrates with SharePoint. “The videos really ‘broke the ice’ with the Essar CIOs,” Sharma says. “We were able to show how Laserfiche functionality could complement SharePoint, not overlap it.”

Sharma says he then showed how Laserfiche’s imaging functionality was an obvious fit for SharePoint’s capabilities. This led to more detailed demonstrations of Workflow and Quick Fields to address specific issues regarding Essar’s invoicing processes, namely how to avoid duplicating invoices.

The Workflow Designer, Sharma says, was instrumental to this part of the presentation. “One of the CIOs asked a really good question about how a third value could be added to a Workflow, and using the Workflow Designer I was able to set it up and publish it in less than ten minutes,” he says.

In the end, Essar was sold. The first phase of the implementation began last November with 100 users in the financial departments of 12 Essar companies. That number will grow to 500 by the time the implementation is complete early next year, and there are plans to eventually expand Rio into all 55 Essar companies in the future.

Achieving Success with Shared Services

Sharma says Sigma-Tech—and all Laserfiche resellers—can leverage the success of the Essar Rio implementation: “There is a remarkable shift in the market towards big corporations looking for shared service centers to centralize business processes. We see ‘Agile ECM Engineered with Laserfiche and SharePoint’ as a great enabler of that.”

In particular, Sharma believes that Workflow 8 and the SDK offer IT departments the flexibility and confidence “to establish shared services across their enterprise.” He also believes that Rio’s promise of unlimited servers bolsters confidence in Laserfiche. “The ability to create test environments is very important—and it allows us to be more competitive,” he concludes.

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Author Info

Laserfiche
Staff

Hobey Echlin is a Writer/Researcher in the Laserfiche Marketing department and is active in the Laserfiche Luminaries program.

Tags: Agile ECM, Essar Group, Laserfiche SDK, Rio, sharepoint, Sigma-Tech India, Workflow

Posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 9:26 am under VAR of the Month. You can comment on this post.