A Three-Phase Document Management Rollout for Hershey Trust Company

The Problem To Be Solved

Hershey Trust Company needed a centralized place to store electronic records, a reliable way to file and retrieve them, and a means of automating document-driven processes across Investment Operations, Accounting, and Legal. Content was spread across network folders without consistent metadata or access controls, and each department was carrying its own filing conventions and approval steps. 

Why Solving The Problem Was Important

A centralized DMS was the foundation for everything else Hershey Trust Company wanted to do, consistent governance, faster retrieval, automated approvals, and clear audit trails. The processes that mattered most to the business ran on documents: capital calls, distribution calls, performance reporting, invoice approvals, capital statements, financial statements, tax filings, and Legal's compliance tracking. Without a unified system underneath, every department was solving the same problems in parallel.

How TEAM IM Got Involved

M-Files identified TEAM IM as the right partner for the evaluation and implementation. Through Q2 2024, TEAM IM met with Hershey Trust Company's departments individually to understand their workflows, ran tailored demos against their actual use cases, and shaped a proposal around a phased rollout, Investment Operations first, then Accounting and Legal. 

The Method

A three-phase approach was created, with each phase targeting one department.

Phase 1: Investment Operations. TEAM IM stood up the centralized M-Files Cloud vault and integrated it with Azure AD, then configured M-Files Workflow Automation for the financial processes that drove the team's day-to-day work: capital calls, distribution calls, performance reporting, invoice approvals, capital statements, financial statements, and tax documents. Content was migrated from network folders into M-Files using the M-Files Importer, with access control mapping preserved so security and permissions carried over. Implementation and training were underway within a month of project start, and the phase came in under budget so funds were rolled into Phases 2 and 3. 

Phase 2: Accounting. The Accounting team needed Microsoft 365 Business Central, which housed their AP invoices, to talk cleanly to M-Files. TEAM IM built a vault application using the Hybrid Object Type (HOT) Connector to automate the full lifecycle of purchase invoices. Accounting staff upload a Purchase Invoice document into M-Files, and the connector populates the required metadata. When the object moves to the "Send to BC" workflow state, the connector validates the information, creates the invoice in Business Central, uploads attachments, and generates any related line items. As Business Central processes and posts the invoice, the connector's polling mechanism detects status changes and syncs them back into M-Files, transitioning the object to states like "Pending Payment" or "Paid" and updating mapped fields. 

Phase 3: Legal. The Legal team maintained a compliance checklist in a spreadsheet, with all the editing conflicts and version drift that implies. TEAM IM designed an M-Files-based solution using metadata and views that lets multiple people view, update, edit, assign, and track checklist items without overwriting each other. 

The End Result

Hershey Trust Company now runs centralized document management across all three departments, with the workflows, integrations, and governance each one needs. Accounting processes purchase invoices faster and with fewer errors through the Business Central integration. Legal has a single source of truth for compliance tracking. And the Investment Operations rollout set the pattern the rest of the organization followed. 

Conclusion

With all three phases live, Hershey Trust Company and TEAM IM have moved into Enhanced Support, covering ongoing changes, enhancements, and improvements over the coming year.