Automation makes mail modern

With over 62,000 employees, Swiss Post is one of the largest employers in Switzerland. An area with 140 employees is responsible for the care of all personnel.

This person is also responsible for written communication with postal employees regarding administration in HR. Large volumes of documents such as employment contracts, references, anniversary letters and information letters are constantly being generated.

The document creation process required for this was always very time-consuming, so serial letter templates were managed in MS-Word or the creation of the documents was done using individual programs.

This work was tedious and resource-intensive, which is why Swiss Post was looking for a new solution. The objective was a fully automated implementation directly from SAP using the existing SAP HR master data.

With DocBuilder from Teamwork Switzerland, Swiss Post found a solution that met these requirements.

Solution from SAP

The fully SAP-based and SAP-embedded solution offers the possibility to create documents via MS Word templates directly from SAP.

Employees of the Personnel Service Center can thus edit and adapt the Word templates themselves at any time and thus respond flexibly to new requirements without specialist IT knowledge.

Based on the selection within the processes (company, personnel area or other data from the process), it is determined which documents are generated. The contents of these documents are then prepared on the basis of tags (field variables).

Formatting is also flexibly designed with tags, for example, there are types for tables, images, barcode, multilingualism, options, etc. The document output is in Word, PDF or PDF/A format.

Documents that need to be checked by third parties before being sent can also be watermarked and only transferred to the finished PDF after approval.

After completion, if required, transfer can take place to the Swiss Post Solutions conveyor line, where printing, packaging and dispatch are handled.

If additional enclosures need to be added, this is also taken into account electronically in the process and communicated to the employees in an additional file.

Documents that are to be returned to the process after printing (e.g., to the electronic personnel file) are printed directly with barcodes so that they are automatically assigned and filed in the correct location.

The Post can use DocBuilder to create documents based on all existing infotypes and use all Word capabilities for the templates (text, images, tables, checkboxes, drop-down lists, bullets, comments, etc.).

Since January 2015, the Post has generated over 70,000 employment contracts and more than half a million documents in total with the solution.

8000 of these were automatically read in again via barcode after signing as scanned documents and assigned to a process or the personnel file.

DocBuilder can be used for all SAP systems and modules of different company sizes.

After a short training period, the forms from the departments can be independently adapted or newly created by the key users.

Technical requirements are SAP systems and modules from ERP Release 4.7 and Java Runtime from 1.4.