Leading Netherlands-based shipbuilder Damen Shipyards Group relies on digital documents to drive key aspects of its business process, including creating and signing customer contracts and applying for employment visas. To reduce its spending on software licenses and cut the time required to create PDFs, Damen replaced multiple PDF editing tools with a single, centralized Kofax Power PDF solution.
Like many engineering businesses, the company relies heavily on digital documents to drive its core processes.
Annemiek Verhagen, Vendor, Contract & License Engineer, Group IT&IM at Damen Shipyards Group, explains: “Whether it’s our researchers designing new products, our back-office team applying for visas for our employees or our legal team drawing up customer contracts, PDFs play a key role in the way we work.”
In the past, each Damen business unit was responsible for purchasing, managing and maintaining its own PDF editing tools. As a result, there were three different PDF tools in use across the business, used by approximately 850 employees in total.
“We knew that using multiple different PDF tools was driving our costs significantly,” continues Annemiek Verhagen. “Because different areas of the business were dealing with their respective PDF vendor individually, we were missing out on chances to gain efficiencies of scale in our licensing and support agreements.”
As one of its key vendors prepared to move to a cloud-first delivery model that was incompatible with its information security policies, Damen saw an opportunity to move to a single-vendor solution.
“As well as reducing our costs, we were confident that standardizing on a single PDF solution provider would enable us to streamline our user training requirements and drive up operational efficiency,” comments Annemiek Verhagen. “To achieve our goal, we looked for a new approach.”
Solution
After a thorough evaluation of the leading PDF solution vendors, Damen selected Kofax Power PDF as its new enterprise-wide solution.
“We wanted a solution that offered a comprehensive range of functionality, including the ability to create, convert, share and electronically sign PDFs,” recalls Annemiek Verhagen. “Kofax Power PDF met all of our requirements—and we were particularly impressed by how easy the solution is to use.”
After a successful large-scale test deployment of Kofax Power PDF lasting more than six months, Damen’s internal IT experts worked with teams from Kofax and SoftwareONE to roll out the solution to its entire community of 850 PDF users.
“Kofax Power PDF offers us all of the same capabilities that we had in our three separate PDF tools, with the additional benefit of being significantly faster and easier to use,” explains Annemiek Verhagen.
“Kofax ran a series of six workshops for our users, which helped us move to the new solution seamlessly and with no impact on our employees’ productivity. Throughout the deployment process, we knew that we could always pick up the phone and speak to the Kofax team whenever we needed it—and we were very pleased with how smoothly the implementation went.”
Results
Since making Kofax Power PDF its corporate standard for creating, editing and signing digital documents, Damen has unlocked significant operational efficiencies and cost-savings.
“It’s now easier than ever for our IT team to set up a new user—they simply push out the Kofax Power PDF installation package to their local machine, and they’re ready to get started in minutes,” says Annemiek Verhagen.
“Kofax Power PDF isn’t just saving time for our IT team. Many of our employees have told us that they’re now able to perform PDF-related tasks significantly faster than before, which can make an important contribution to our operational efficiency. Most importantly, the Kofax solution is significantly more cost-effective than our previous approach. In fact, we estimate that we are now saving more than €300,000 on our licensing costs, a huge reduction.”
Based on its positive experience with Kofax Power PDF, Damen is investigating other document flows with potential for improvement. The company is currently exploring opportunities to harness intelligent print management software from Kofax to help contain its print infrastructure costs.
“Working with Kofax to rationalize our approach to PDFs was a great success,” concludes Annemiek Verhagen. “We have reduced our operational spending and cut the time required to create and edit PDF documents. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to other organizations.”
