How Bauder brought 40,000 scattered documents into Salesforce

Documents scattered across Salesforce, drives, and databases

When Bauder adopted Salesforce to digitize their project work, the sales team adapted quickly. The service team did not. They continued working on network drives and numerous isolated databases — duplicating work, creating service documents twice, and leaving the Field Service team without access to documents in the field.

The result was the opposite of what Salesforce was meant to deliver. To get the job done, people had to navigate a growing number of tools outside the platform.

Salesforce is a strong CRM platform. But it is not designed for robust document handling. Bauder needed a system that could manage documents across both pre- and post-sales — without pulling people out of Salesforce to find them.

Affordable, cloud-based, and built for Salesforce

As the document chaos continued to grow, Bauder defined exactly what they needed from a document management system.

We were looking for an affordable cloud-based document management, with simple Salesforce integration, powerful search capabilities, and easy configuration.
— Sabrina Kurek, CRM Manager, Paul Bauder GmbH

Why Bauder chose a vendor they could build with

After evaluating several software vendors, Bauder selected Nextway as their document management partner. Next gave the team a single, structured view of all customer documents — for the first time, everything in one place.

But the product was only part of the decision. The real value was in working with a vendor that has its own development team — one that Bauder could influence directly. Being able to contribute feedback and shape the product over time was central to how they wanted to work.

All documents in one place — without leaving Salesforce

With Next integrated into Salesforce, the sales and service teams now have a complete, structured view of all documents: Word files, PDFs, images, technical drawings, emails. Employees work entirely within the platform.

The features they use most day to day:

• Add documents via drag and drop or the mobile app.
• Process documents faster with predefined forms and automatic metadata suggestions.
• Search full document content — not just file names or metadata.

The result is faster project processing and smoother collaboration across departments.

Next makes it both easier and faster for us to store, manage and share thousands of documents across several departments.
— Sabrina Kurek, CRM Manager, Paul Bauder GmbH

EU data residency and role-based access control

Next stores all Bauder documents on Microsoft Azure servers in Frankfurt, Germany — meeting Bauder’s requirement for EU data residency. Role-based access control ensures employees can only access documents relevant to their role.

From 10,000 documents at go-live to 40,000 in six months

At go-live, approximately 10,000 documents were migrated to the system. Within six months, the document count had grown to approximately 40,000. After an initial learning curve, users are now comfortable with the system and adding new documents regularly.

Initially, we migrated our service documents. Today, people are also adding other files, such as project images, and calculations.
— Sabrina Kurek, CRM Manager, Paul Bauder GmbH

An ongoing development partnership, not a one-time implementation

Today, Bauder and Nextway continue to develop the platform together, bringing new functionality and optimizations as needs evolve.