Globus Fachmärkte GmbH & Co. KG

The Globus retail company, which is managed by Globus Holding GmbH & Co. KG, was established in St. Wendel, Saarland, in 1828. It is now one of Germany's leading trading companies with 7.95 billion Euros in the 2019/2020 financial year and currently 50 self-service department stores, 90 DIY superstores and six consumer electronics retailers. The Globus Group also has 27 large supermarkets in the Czech Republic and Russia, and two DIY superstores in Luxembourg. A total of almost 47,000 employees currently work for the family-run company. The MR.KNOW process management software from Inspire Technologies has now given the company a solution for digitalization and process automation which can be used to connect all employees and service providers.

Many processes within the company have been carried out manually to date, but this has now changed. In order to reduce costs and increase efficiency, Globus decided to automate many of its processes. To do this, the company is relying on cooperation with Inspire Technologies, the specialist for process management software and digital assistant MR.KNOW. The companies have already implemented six workflows together. Four of these are already up and running, and two more are under development.

As an initial step into the digitalized future, the invoicing processes have been automated. Thanks to the MR.KNOW – INVOICE ASSISTANT, the former mountains of paper invoices can now be processed quickly and correctly, therefore reducing the internal invoice processing costs. As an additional step, Globus has introduced a fuel card management process which simplifies bill processing.

Another process which has been implemented, safety data sheet workflow, is an extension for product information management. Since the Globus market also sells hazardous substances, it is obliged to provide safety data sheets for them. These have now been digitalized, and the processing and provision thereof have been optimised.

Apropos hazardous substances, another process has been implemented: the SCIP/ECHA workflow. The SCIP database is an electronic database of the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) for substances of concern. The dealers of products such as these have been obliged to notify the ECHA of the hazardous substances which they contain since January 5th, 2021. Thanks to the SCIP/ECHA workflow, this is carried out automatically so that these reports do not have to be produced manually.

And HR is also optimized with MR.KNOW. All HR processes such as changes to working hours, terminations and appointments are currently still being carried out manually. A modern workflow management system is currently being created in this case in order to digitalize these processes. The goal is to have any kind of document sent to a central email address, and read out and classified by the software. An appropriate task is then automatically generated and assigned to the responsible clerk in the dashboard. Once the clerk has entered all of the necessary information, the task is displayed to the recipient in their HR dashboard. In the final step, following approval from the HR department, posting in the system takes place. A connection to third-party systems for transferring applicant data, for example, is also guaranteed.

Another process solution is own brand workflow. This controls the production and shipping of the own brands of Globus. It is connected to other systems directly. The workflow also takes care of customs clearance: the incoming goods are automatically declared to customs and taxed. This means that the goods can be forwarded directly to the warehouse.

Because of the many advantages that are provided to Globus by intelligent business process automation, other use cases are going to be implemented with MR.KNOW in the future.

Our process solution for retail: Get to know the MR.KNOW - RETAIL ASSISTANT!