This month Alfresco hosted a few seminars across Europe, that brought together Alfresco leaders, customers, partners, and consultants. Those events are a great opportunity to get inspired by meaningful and fruitful keynotes and sessions and it is always a pleasure to spend time with experts and innovators in the content and process management context.

Digital technology has changed the business landscape in every imaginable way. How employees work, where value comes from, how to gain an edge, the importance of security, and so much more. (John Newton in “Digital transformation: it’s all about flow“). Alfresco is aware of how technology and innovation are disrupting the user’s journey in managing processes and, together with all partners, is helping customers in the modern transition.

Translating the digital transformation into a scalable and affordable solution is OUR today’s challenge. For partners, like Pernexas, the transformation means connecting content and process (AKA Alfresco) with enterprise application (aka SAP); Incentro is developing a tight user interface to motivate employees and customers to easily execute their (work) processes and submit their documents and data flawlessly. System integrators, like Contezza, help companies to move to smart, safe, and data-driven businesses.

But what does digital transformation mean for our customers?

The modernization process on the customer level experience is a matter of the whole organization and requires both, front-end customer-facing functions and back-end. Companies must review their operations with an open mind accepting that a radically different approach may be needed. All parts of the operating model (i.e. channels, people, process, technology, and information) should be reviewed. 

During the Alfresco day event in Amsterdam, two customers of ours showed how they are unlocking the value of Alfresco, by adopting targeted products and solutions to increase the quality of services and time-to-market and reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).

Two different customers, two different organizations and approaches, two different solutions, but some challenges to be solved: an agile architecture to go faster into the market and a higher user adoption to drive change.

P&V: The Alfresco foundation architecture for integrated full digital insurance process

P&V Group is leading the Belgian cooperative insurance company with over a century of history, with a multi-brand and multi-channel sales policy. The group has a number of different insurance businesses:

• P&V Insurance, which works with a network of exclusive agents,
• Vivium, Arces and Piette & Partners, which sell their products via brokers, and
• Actel, which sells directly via the Internet and indirectly through agreements with vehicle importers.

For Dominiek Leclercq, Domain expert, and Tom Dewaele, Project Manager at the P&V Digital Competence center, the digitization process is translated into a decoupled and simplified architecture, by integrating their online operations (Guidewire) into several Alfresco instances, through the Xenit’s API Gateway, Alfred Edge, a single point of entry for an agile solution.

For P&V, the results of the ECM foundation are:

• Increased time-to-market
• Reduced TCO
• Online availability

Ville De Liege: Enterprise portal

Ville de Liege is the Public Administration of Liege, the third biggest city in Belgium, with 2900 full-time employees, 100 sites, and 30 missions (population management, education, public spaces management,…).

CIO, M. Benoit Joseph, and his team’s main goals are to align the IT strategy to their business needs, increase the efficiency, and quality of service, drive digitization and reduce the overall TCO. The enterprise portal solution is an architecture that integrates:

• Alfresco Content Services, as a digital platform, offers rich services and provides accountability and traceability on documents;
• Alfred Desktop: a smart and controlled shared drive, desktop application for Alfresco, that provides an explorer-like interface to the users, with advanced search options, metadata management, and folder structure templates;
• Business Application: to handle business tasks and produce all required documents.

The solution is built upon a smart content model, supporting multiple departments and a user-friendly interface, with powerful search tools and better desktop integration with Alfresco.

In reviewing the Alfresco event surveys, these sessions received astounding scores and remarks. Xenit is playing an important role in unlocking the value of Alfresco, by developing products and solutions to ensure customers can implement their strategies in a simple and long-term cost-efficient way. We build a trusted and sustainable relationship with our customers, driven by their needs, enhanced by our expertise, and by delivering quality and reliability. This is what digital transformation means for us: a pragmatic and scalable approach to solving customers’ challenges in an agile and intelligent way. Customers can innovate their processes without disrupting their operations.