Lewis Group is devoted to maintaining a culture of effective corporate governance

Objectif Lune’s workflow technology for pen and paper helps Lewis reach key strategic objectives to ensure long-term sustainability of the business.

Lewis Group is South Africa’s leading retailer of household furniture, electrical appliances and home electronics, sold on credit. Focused primarily on the rapidly expanding middle to lower income market, the group has a credit customer base of close to 700 000 making Lewis the country’s largest furniture chain and one of the most recognisable brands in furniture retailing.
www.lewisgroup.co.za

Lewis Group is devoted to maintaining a culture of effective corporate governance to ensure the long-term sustainability of the business. Key medium-term strategic objectives included: to grow the store base to 700, improve operating profit margin, reduce debtor costs as well as maintain costs.

Lewis Group wanted to optimise processes within the current business model, particularly focusing on the credit application process. This remains one of the most central business process for Lewis group’s operations and currently takes place daily in over 600 store branches across South Africa.

Objectif Lune’s workflow technology, PlanetPress Capture was combined with Anoto’s digital writing technologies.The solution designed for the Lewis Group ensures:

• Document composition and automated workflow capabilities guaranteed
• User data from the system is 100% correctly linked with the unique capture zones, no need for any image character recognition (ICR) process to complete
• Initial benefits were gained from ultilising the fastest printing available with low bandwidth usage
• Optimised Postscript and signature capture zones, were placed only where needed, instead of printing full pattern pages
• Patterns in a condensed format were stored, resulting in smaller sized PDF’s – perfect for archiving
• No cost per page, due to PlanetPress Capture having 10,000 reusable patterns with every license
• Integration with any IT infrastructure compatible with most hosts systems, servers and databases

• Reduce costs – no more irretrievable documents as digital copies of the contracts are immediately available
• Maintain costs and improve operating profit margin – reduced printing costs as a result of eliminating the need for a multipart business form,  only one is now necessary. Also boxes of signed contracts previously had to be regularly shipped to Head Office for processing and archiving, the new solution allows everything to be done electronically, saving on both time and shipping costs.
• Optimise business processes – changes required on contract forms become available instantaneously as modification made at Head Office can be instantly pushed through to all branches and processed immediately
• Environment sustainability – reduced significantly the number of printed pages and eliminated document shipping resulting in low paper consumption and lower carbon footprint