KWS – HR Contract Automation: Automating International Employment Contracts with SharePoint Online, dox42, and the Power Platform

"With the implementation of dynamic templates, new templates can be created and used at any time without the need for development effort."

KWS is one of the world’s leading plant breeding companies. With over 5,000 employees in more than 70 countries, the company generated sales of around €1.5 billion in the 2021/2022 fiscal year. For more than 165 years, KWS has been independently and family-run. Its core business areas include plant breeding, production, and the sale of seeds for corn, sugar beet, cereals, vegetables, rapeseed, and sunflowers. KWS employs cutting-edge plant breeding methods to increase farmers' yields and to enhance plant resistance to diseases, pests, and abiotic stress.

With now 87 subsidiaries and affiliated companies, and a growing number of customers, partners, and employees, the creation of new and employment contracts, as well as the associated contract processes, have become increasingly complex and significant within the company.

Time-consuming correction loops, frustrating formatting errors, loss of time due to duplicate data entry, and the desire to act more sustainably and environmentally consciously ultimately led to the decision to automate German employment contracts.

The introduction of HR Contract Automation further advanced the digitalization of contract processes within the HR department. Personnel actions such as salary increases or internal job changes were significantly simplified.

The technical implementation is based on SharePoint Online, dox42 Online, and Power Apps, seamlessly integrating these technologies to provide a fully customized automation solution for HR contract management processes.

To realize the project, the use of SharePoint forms was deliberately avoided in favor of developing a Power App, minimizing dependency on SharePoint.

For document generation, the partner product dox42 was utilized. With dox42, a significant reduction in the number of contract templates—previously over 100—was achieved. Managing templates, such as incorporating legal changes, was thus considerably simplified. With the use of dynamic templates, new templates can be created and used at any time without any development effort. When defining a new HR action, a new template can be added within just a few minutes.