Polyus Group is one of the ten largest gold mining companies in the world. Its main enterprises are located in the Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk and Magadan regions, as well as in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). The company includes five operating mines, gold placers, and several projects under construction and development.
In 2017, Polyus Group launched a program to create a multifunctional center in Krasnoyarsk, with the aim of centralizing financial and tax accounting, personnel management, and payment processing functions under the separate legal entity. As part of the program to establish the Multifunctional Center (MFC), a project to develop and implement an automated electronic document management system (EDMS) was initiated. System was intended as the infrastructure provider, necessary for MFC services, specifically for an electronic archive for primary documents. The project also involved the task of converting a portion of accounting documents electronic format, using electronic signatures.
Company’s specialists considered multiple platforms, choosing according to various criteria, including total cost of ownership, compliance with functional and technical requirements, and more. Following the evaluation, WSS Docs Platform from WSS‑Solutions was chosen.
Customer identified the following key advantages of the platform:
Additional functionality was developed to export all necessary documents, needed to respond to requests from the Federal Tax Service (FNS). Document workflow with external counterparties is implemented through Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) operators, specifically the Diadoc System. This integration allows users to automatically transmit structured and non-formalized documents, signed with an electronic signature in WSS Docs, to the EDI operator's system. Printable versions of those documents are also automatically saved.
The key advantage of implementing EDI with electronic signatures is the elimination of unnecessary steps inherent in paper-based document workflow, such as:
The electronic archive of the MFC provides centralized and structured storage of scanned copies of primary accounting and personnel documents, as well as electronically signed digital versions of the documents. The archive performs such functions as document registration, routing, tracking signing deadlines and lifecycle indicators, structured storage, document compilation, generating exports, and more.
It is worth noting that initially, employees of the Polyus Group felt some skepticism towards the new system. It was expected that organizational measures would be necessary to encourage employees to use the new system, as is often the case when implementing new products in organizations. However, this was successfully avoided. Employees highly appreciated the convenience and benefits of using the new system and began recommending it to their colleagues. The “word of mouth” effect occurred, actively encouraging employees to join ranks of the new EDMS users, significantly accelerating the implementation process.
Meeting the requirements for information security was one of the most significant challenges during project implementation. As the EDMS processes documents containing personal information, the implementation was carried out in strict accordance with all relevant Federal Laws of the Russian Federation. Electronic signatures were issued by internal (proprietary) and external certification authorities.
To promptly address any technical issues that arose during the implementation and replication stages, WSS‑Solutions remotely supported the system from the Moscow office. In collaboration with the customer, a Competence Center was established, creating three lines of technical support that connected center specialists with consultants and developers in a sequential manner. When there were requests from the customer to change something in the system, prompt functional enhancements were carried out by WSS‑Solutions developers. Online consultations for EDMS users were organized to increase incident resolution speed and to collect feedback.
Implementation of WSS Docs ECM System has led to the following effects:
Furthermore, significant progress has been achieved in the following areas of management control: the timeliness of submitting, signing, and processing documents for the MFC, as well as the quality of provided documents, and the control over their archival placement. Currently, over 70% of all documents at the Polyus Group are signed within 1 day, which would have been impossible with paper-based document workflow. Company generates over 23 million electronic documents annually, using digital signatures, — that is the number of unnecessary iterations they now can avoid.
“The implementation of our EDM System at Polyus Group is the largest project in the history of WSS‑Solutions. We are greatly satisfied with the experience gained during this project. It was a significant challenge for the company, which we successfully handled. We were pleased to see substantial support during the implementation process, both from the management and regular users. WSS‑Solutions would like to thank the project participants from Polyus Group for their joint efforts. We are delighted that the customer expresses a desire to continue developing the system and migrating other business processes to the new system," noted Gennady Popov, WSS‑Solutions CEO.
Currently, Polyus Group continues to replicate the solution from the initial two companies to other entities within the Group. The internal configuration of the EDMS for each newly connected company takes just one day, and the execution is performed within the user interface and does not necessitate any developer intervention.
As of May 2019, over half of the Group’s organizational units had been connected to the WSS Docs ECM Platform.
