Panaxia Security AB is one of Sweden’s leading security solution and services companies. It offers transport, storage, and surveillance of theft-prone goods as well as installation and support for security equipment. Panaxia’s customers include retail organisations, banking institutions, public administration, municipalities and property companies. The company has over 20 locations throughout Sweden and over 1,200 employees.

Consolidating Technologies after an Acquisition

In 2008 Panaxia acquired three security related companies giving it a greater presence throughout Sweden. For the IT department, the acquisitions meant a fragmented technology infrastructure with multiple in-house and outsourced finance, accounting and document management systems. The company needed to consolidate and bring all systems under one centrally managed IT department.

As a leading security company Panaxia had concerns about outsourcing the management of highly sensitive documents and information. The company also wanted to move away from its standard file system to an open source enterprise document management system that would be easy-to-use and implement across the organisation. The new system needed to be highly secure, simple-to-use and integrate with a newly purchased CRM system from SugarCRM.

Why Alfresco was chosen

Panaxia was in the process of implementing SugarCRM when it began evaluating document management systems. Alfresco’s close integration with SugarCRM and its robust features made it the clear choice for Panaxia. Alfresco Enterprise provides Panaxia with a document repository that is as simple-to-use as their shared drive but with the benefits for version control, sharing, workflow, auditing and enhanced document security. By migrating all of Panaxia documents into one Alfresco repository, the company can easily manage the creation and storage of its documents as well as enforce document-level security.

Another selling point for Panaxia was Alfresco’s search capabilities. The company’s client service team could not quickly search documents in their old systems and it could take hours to look up and respond to a client question. With Alfresco, Panaxia can create a taxonomy structure and add metadata values to any document or content within the repository making it as easy to search as Google.

Panaxia’s client service team can now search across multiple Alfresco repositories and sites to pull up relevant client information and address questions in real-time.

“Alfresco was an easy decision for us and came highly recommended. Alfresco Enterprise took the complexity out of merging multiple DM systems into one system. It was easy to implement, integrate, customise, and roll out to our organisation. We began seeing its benefits immediately” Åke Forsberg, CIO, Panaxia

Seamless Integrating with SugarCRM

Panaxia worked closely with Swedish systems integrator, Redpill Linpro, on both the implementation of Alfresco and SugarCRM. Redpill Linpro helped the company select, design and migrate content to Alfresco Enterprise as well as built custom workflows.

Panaxia is running Alfresco and SugarCRM on Linux Ubuntu. Alfresco is integrated with SugarCRM, so that the sales/client service team can access documents such as contracts or invoices in the Alfresco repository directly from SugarCRM.

Using Alfresco Panaxia has created specific document management applications for its finance, information technology, client service and sales teams. Selected individuals within each group are responsible for the sites and managing its content. With Alfresco, these individuals can create user settings and control who has access to read and edit content.

Panaxia used Alfresco workflows to help automate sales processes such as the development and approvals of contracts. The new workflows integrate with SugarCRM and have helped the organisation improve many key document processes.

“Redpill Linpro was a pleasure to work with and are extremely knowledgeable. They showed us how Alfresco could help automate our document processes in a secure manner while keeping system costs down. They have become an extension of our team providing development expertise, support and training on Alfresco.” Åke Forsberg, CIO, Panaxia

The Benefits of using Alfresco

Panaxia saw immediate benefits with Alfresco by having one centrally managed document management system for the entire company. With Alfresco the company improved key document processes through workflow and automation saving time and resources. More importantly, the new system provides Panaxia with a content repository that is easy to navigate and search. This has allowed the company to be more responsive to client questions.

“Implementing Alfresco was the right decision for our organisation. We have improved employee access to content, automated many processes and developed a secure content repository at a fraction of the cost of our old system.” Åke Forsberg, CIO, Panaxia

Panaxia is working with Redpill Linpro to further expand its use of Alfresco. The company plans to provide additional training to Alfresco site leaders so that they can take full advantage of all the features within Alfresco. The company is also looking at integrating Alfresco with multifunctional printers (MFPs) for invoice handling and scanning documents directly into the Alfresco repository.

For more information please contact:

Carl Nordenfelt