Progressive workflows for an established company.
Gebrüder Weiss manages logistics spanning the globe with paperless workflows using Adobe Acrobat.
Higher team productivity by streamlining collaboration across locations
Products:
Results
More efficient business processes with digital document management.
Higher team productivity by streamlining collaboration across locations.
Better customer experiences with both paper and paperless services.
Flexibility and planning predictability with agreement for Adobe Acrobat.
“Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is the best document tool for us because it meets all of our day-to-day operational needs.”
Artur Kalb
Head of IT Services Infrastructure, Gebrüder Weiss GmbH
Strengthening connections between stakeholders
Gebrüder Weiss is by far the oldest transport and logistics company in Austria. Over the past 500 years, it has matured into a global player. While mounted messengers once carried cargo across the Alps, today Gebrüder Weiss connects the flow of goods across Europe, Asia and America by land, sea and air. The company’s 6,500 employees generate turnover of more than €1 billion through the company’s 150 global locations.
The key to the company’s success is a fast, reliable and efficient flow of information. For this reason, the transport and logistics service provider recognised opportunities for digitisation at an early stage and it has driven digital transformation at various levels of the business over the years. The company’s technological process is impressive, including use of depth cameras to automatically determine delivery volume or augmented reality to pick up orders at warehouses.
However, one of the biggest challenges for the company is not just collecting, but also sharing data to strengthen connections between all stakeholders along the supply chain. Gebrüder Weiss increasingly relies on paperless business processes for consistent, error-free information logistics. This allows all stakeholders to access required information through the Internet and intranet.
Today, digitised documents act as a kind of digital messenger that shares information along the supply chain. Therefore, it is important that Gebrüder Weiss implement a uniform document standard for documents that can be displayed on all devices. Adobe Acrobat Pro DC and PDF files are indispensable components of the digitisation strategy at Gebrüder Weiss.
An indispensable standard for digital operations
Since 2001, Gebrüder Weiss has worked with Adobe Acrobat as it transitioned into the digital age. Currently, the company is licensing the solution through an Adobe Enterprise Term Licence Agreement (ETLA), which helps ensure both flexibility and planning predictability.
“Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is the best document tool for us because it meets all of our day-to-day operational needs,” says Artur Kalb, Head of IT Services Infrastructure at Gebrüder Weiss.
From the effective security features, which can prevent people from changing contracts, to the intuitive editing features that allow people to extract, merge or edit PDF files when appropriate, Adobe Acrobat is a constant in daily operations for Gebrüder Weiss.
“Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is one of the most underrated tools available. It allows us to use almost no paper in our daily operations.”
Stephan Jöhnk
IT Service Desk Team, Gebrüder Weiss GmbH
Promoting paperless information logistics
Kalb notes that other strengths of Adobe Acrobat include its high degree of stability and how easily it integrated into the existing Gebrüder Weiss environment. That’s why Acrobat is also the tool of choice for reading and printing documents from the forwarding order and accounting archive. All documents from the transport and logistics business are stored in this archive so employees can access the correct information at any time, regardless of location. If bills of landing, delivery notes or invoices are sent on paper, rather than digitally, they are scanned and text is made searchable through OCR processing. Employees can access the document archive from any environment and display it on their device using Acrobat.
Having documents available digitally removes a significant workload from Gebrüder Weiss employees. Now the correct information is always available within seconds. This helps employees collaborate much easier, even across remote locations.
“Adobe Acrobat Pro DC is one of the most underrated tools available. It allows us to use almost no paper in our daily operations,” explains Stephan Jöhnk, IT Service Desk Team, who receives first-hand feedback from users.
Improving customer experiences through digital document processes
Digitising document workflows increases the efficiency of internal processes at Gebrüder Weiss. It also helps the company improve service for its customers by freeing them from the hassle of paperwork. An example of this is a new Internet portal that provides a seamless and modern user experience for customers to do everything from requesting prices to tracking a delivery.
Digitising logistics information also enables Gebrüder Weiss to establish a paperless order picking system that allows the company to process thousands of small orders per day for global brands such as Nespresso. Anyone reading this text with a cup of Nespresso in one hand may have Gebrüder Weiss to thank for the reliable delivery of their coffee capsule.
“Working with Adobe XD helped all of our stakeholders feel like they were right there working beside us for a fluid collaboration that elevated the project to achieve a student-centred outcome.”
Randal Hollis
Experience Designer, FreshForm
Design spec tools streamline development
FreshForm designers appreciated the integration with other Adobe Creative Cloud apps. Designers developed icons in Adobe Illustrator, while Adobe Photoshop was used to edit images for the log in page. Designers could easily bring those finished assets into Adobe XD to create the style tiles.
Adobe XD also extended ease of collaboration to the FreshForm web development team. Sharing published design specs gave developers more than just visual references. They can click colours and see the dimensions of images and buttons to quickly determine the style and specs for each element. This helped streamline and accelerate coding and quality assurance testing.
“We worked with our web developers to make changes to the LMS,” says Hollis. “We would make the changes on the Adobe XD prototype and then the developers could immediately take those changes and translate them to the production design.”
Preparing the LMS for future developments
The new LMS is extremely flexible and the design is fully responsive for display on any device. While the students who tested the LMS disliked learning on the smaller screens of smartphones, tablets proved to be a very popular alternative to desktops.
FreshForm is contributing to future planning with a style guide that it created using Adobe XD. The document contains specifications and standards for dozens of design elements. Once the agency has trained course designers to understand the instructional and visual design rules, they will be empowered to update the system and develop new lessons for the LMS. The Adobe XD style guide will help course designers easily maintain consistent design over hundreds of courses by providing a single source to quickly find all icons, colours, fonts and other design elements.
CTY is currently preparing to roll out the newly re-designed LMS. “I hope that students will be using this design system for years to come,” says Robert Arena, Senior Director of Online Programmes at CTY. “Even as new technologies emerge, we have confidence that we can adapt the visual design easily as we grow.”