Sofico Celebrates 20th Bday in Australia, and EDocs
By Caroline Falls
Sofico Services is celebrating its 20th year in Australia this year and its customers — OEMs, automotive finance and leasing companies — are celebrating one of the software group’s latest innovations — eDocs.
I went to Sofico’s beautiful anniversary party in November — in Sydney at the old Mint in Macquarie Street and met with the Brussels-headquartered group’s founders and international and local management.
I didn’t take notes in the break between information sessions that covered EV trends and data analysis but some of Sofico’s customers that I spoke to were very excited about the transformation eDocs was bringing to their, and their clients’, experience of buying a car. Not only them, but everyone in the supply chain that was using it. Not only buying a car, also leasing one, managing one, buying or leasing 100s or 1000s of cars and managing fleets of vehicles.
“EDocs matters to everyone in the supply chain,” said Phil Farhart, senior account manager at Sofico Services Australia, adding, it’s a paperless automation and a whole of life digital solution.
EDocs was introduced about one year ago in Sofico’s closer to home territories of Europe. Every year Sofico process some 12.4 million documents, so it makes sense that they would want to change the game to automation.
EDocs is more than an electronic signature. It is a mechanism to send a digital piece of paper to customers and to colleagues. It comes with dates, notes, attachments. Photos, and e-signatures.
I know, right, like me, maybe you’re thinking, so what? What don’t they already do that? Haven’t they been doing that like forever? Apparently not. The processes to date still involved lots of people sitting in front of people and producing pieces of paper and physical documents.
Covid-19 lockdowns and the trend to work from home kick started Sofico’s development of automating documents on its widely used Miles software platform.
“We’ve really had to rethink some of the things, reimagine how we do what we do,” said Liam Cullen, a product owner at Sofico Services in one of the information sessions. “We had to find ways of transacting without face-to-face contact.” Cullen did his IT apprenticeship at Qantas many years ago when it pioneered connectivity in fleet. Now some 25 years later he’s helping bring that automation to the automative industry.
Cullen offered any of the Miles users in the audience that weren’t using eDocs yet to come and learn how to incorporate it into their way of doing business.
Miles eDocs can be used for quotation documents, edited and signed by customers and employers. It can be used for vehicle purchase documents, edited and signed by dealerships. It can be used for incident documents for drivers and suppliers.
The key thing about eDocs, apart from security, is the efficiency of the process, said Sofico people. It helps people all through the supply chain get things done faster.
