Konica-Minolta Optimizes Productivity with BonitaSoft's Business Process Management Software

SAN FRANCISCO, August 31, 2011 /PRNewswire/ --

- BonitaSoft Enables Significant Productivity Gains in Contract Management for Leading Printing Equipment Manufacturer

BonitaSoft, the leader in open source business process management (BPM), announced today that Konica-Minolta France has implemented its solution to optimize the company's contract management processes as part of its migration to a service-oriented architecture. Konica-Minolta is one of the world leaders in printing equipment as well as a major player in the optics, medical imaging and industrial measurement markets.

With more than 100,000 units of equipment leased to its customers, 70 Konica-Minolta employees in France process 2,000 contracts - new contracts or renewals - each month. In light of the spectacular, 20% growth in this core business since 2010, Konica-Minolta sought to optimize its entire contract management process, from data entry to billing, including sales simulations and the analysis of possible configurations and specific product architectures.

At the same time, this sustained growth prompted Konica-Minolta to overhaul its information system, to enable greater agility and responsiveness. "We adopted an SOA-architecture and broke down our information system into a number of smaller, easily maintainable components. The end goal was to improve our responsiveness and the quality of our customer relations," explains Xavier Riehl, Head of information systems, sales administration, development and quality at Konica-Minolta. "As we had decided to migrate our Lotus Notes infrastructure over to a service-oriented architecture, we had to implement a new, more modern process automation and management solution that was suited to our business issues."

Konica-Minolta chose BonitaSoft over other solutions rather than developing its own system. "A lot of the solutions currently available on the market are closed, which makes it impossible not only to develop new connectors but also to control the older developments," comments Franck Inglebert, Head of development at Konica-Minolta France. "BonitaSoft not only met these requirements, but what's more, its graphic modelling approach helped us to quickly master the product, which was crucial as we were on a very ambitious schedule."

One year after the project's inception, Konica-Minolta is reporting positive results. "First, by doing away with paper and manual processes, we have boosted the reliability of our processes based on our company's business rules," Mr Riehl explains. "Second, we now have end-to-end traceability, which helps us track back to the source of any error or non-quality. This puts us in line with not only  regulatory compliance obligations but also with our own quality standards. Finally, we have seen a spectacular jump in our productivity; a new contract, which was traditionally approved in 4 or 5 days in the past, can now be approved in under an hour. And the big winners are our customers, who have fewer disputes to resolve. Overall, our contract processing capacity has increased by 30%."

Following the success of this first implementation, Konica-Minolta's teams are now planning to roll out BonitaSoft for some of the company's other key processes, including approving supplier invoices and payment authorizations, managing its automobile fleet, expense forms and quality monitoring. As a result, more than 200 business applications implemented with Lotus Notes are currently in the process of migrating to BonitaSoft.

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About BonitaSoft

BonitaSoft democratizes business process management (BPM) by bringing powerful, easy-to-integrate, and user-friendly, open source BPM to organizations of all sizes and industries. BonitaSoft and its open source community deliver an unmatched ecosystem of connectors for nearly any application and system. With the BonitaSoft suite, organizations can model, automate and optimize process workflows in Finance, Human Resources, Sales, Marketing, Supply Chain, E-Government, and more, according to their respective business or technical roles. The fastest-growing BPM provider, BonitaSoft has more than 800,000 downloads, 180 customers and 8,000 community members.