How Acerta scaled tailored HR services with LawVu Draft

Acerta is one of Belgium’s largest HR services providers and offers consulting, payroll processing, software, and more to assist companies in HR management. It is also a government-certified social secretariat, an organization that is entitled to process a wide range of HR-related administrative challenges for Belgian companies.

The challenge: Scaling tailored HR documents without manual work

While document production is a vital element of the services provided by social secretariats, it has mostly remained a manual process. Acerta prides itself on the tailored service it offers to its clients but realized that significant uncertainty remains during the turnaround time needed to tailor a document to a client’s needs.

Furthermore, a large part of the work required to produce these documents is the typical “battle” with Microsoft Word – aligning heading styles, ensuring numbering is consistent, fixing spacing issues, etc. Hardly a fulfilling job.

“Nowhere was the challenge of providing tailored services at scale more pressing than in the creation of labor regulations documents – typically a 50+ page document setting out a complete overview of the rights and obligations of the employee towards the employer and vice versa (and a legal requirement for every Belgian company). Before LawVu Draft, it could take hours to create, and the work was repetitive.”

Wilfried Leboy, Business Assistant – Acerta

The solution: A questionnaire-driven approach to HR documents

Determined to find a more client-centric solution to the repetitive and time-consuming process of creating labor regulations documents, Acerta decided to enlist the aid of LawVu Draft to automate their template documents in a way that improved the speed at which documents could be created, without sacrificing tailoring.

Previously, the client would receive a MS Word checklist which had to manually be filled out by the client to allow the Legal Consult team to draft a tailored labor regulation document which had to be supplemented with sector-specific regulations.

With the help of LawVu Draft, Acerta’s clients now receive a virtual questionnaire which only shows questions relevant to them. The answers to these questions feed directly into the document generation module to instantly set up a document tailored to their commercial and legal position.

The result: Thousands of hours saved through document automation

A process that previously could take days or weeks due to different steps and personal that had to be involved has now been brought down to an almost same-day-delivery system.

Under the old, manual process, the actual creation of a document, provided the necessary information was correctly supplied by the client, could take an experienced consultant around two hours. Today, this takes little more than 30 minutes, and the maintenance of the template documents has been similarly sped up.

Factoring in the sheer volume of tailored work rules documents that have to be created on an annual basis (+/- 1,000 per year) and the total size of the impacted team, the time savings number into the thousands of hours – and that’s just for one single type of document. The potential exists to completely transform the way legal documents are created for social secretariat clients.