DOCUNIZE™ at Aareal Bank

Headquartered in Wiesbaden, Germany, Aareal Bank is one of the leading international specialists for financing solutions and services, particularly in the property sector. Whether office buildings, hotels, shopping centres or logistics and residential properties, whether in North America, Asia or Europe: Aareal Bank supports its clients in financing their international property investments with customised and flexible solutions.

When it comes to company-wide template management, Aareal Bank also relies on a specialist – the professional template management system DOCUNIZE™.

More than 1150 templates in 6 languages and for 21 locations have to be managed efficiently and in conformity with CD. Then  about 1200 employees should be able to access the current templates – no matter from which location.

The template management process at Aareal Bank

The templates at Aareal Bank come from very different areas – from the Credit Department, Corporate Communications, Organisation, Information & Technology and Human Resources.

The authors from the individual departments – supported by the template team – were responsible for creating the templates. Approval was given by the managers or heads of department. In organisational terms, the templates were each sent to the template team as a file attachment. The template team took care of quality assurance and technical provision. An in-house tool based on an Access database was used for administration.

“A very decisive reason for replacing the in-house developed tool was the desire to switch to standard software,” says Ms Petra Haas, Director IT & Organisation Service and in charge of the project to introduce a template management system. The new tool had to be audit-proof, reliable but also user-friendly. According to these criteria, various systems were evaluated and DOCUNIZE™ was chosen.

Changeover a success – DOCUNIZE™ fully accepted

Ms Haas is convinced that the changeover to DOCUNIZE™ was so easy not least because the existing tool for managing templates was already of a high standard and, moreover, was well accepted in-house. This acceptance was further strengthened by the introduction of a specialist editor tool and the expansion of the interface to the DMS Doxis4. “We see further potential for future programme developments to increase acceptance in the future,” says Ms Haas.

DOCUNIZE™ and Doxis4 – perfect interaction

In order to implement the requirement to support barcodes, a connection was made to the DMS Doxis4 of the enterprise management specialist SER used at Aareal Bank. DOCUNIZE™ and Doxis4 are connected via a Web/HTTP API. Data is supplied by Doxis4 in XML format, generated by DOCUNIZE™ together with the template and returned to Doxis4. Templates are linked to tasks in Doxis4. The user enters the master data for this process and creates various documents based on this data. The documents are generated by DOCUNIZE™ and stored in Doxis4.

What happens next?

Ms Haas gives a positive summary of her experience with DOCUNIZE™ so far. And it relies on the further development of the system. “We still have many ideas and are in close contact with COC AG. For example, I would like to see a connection to SAP and an exchange with other DOCUNIZE™ customers and users in the future. In this way, we could also participate in their ideas.