CIT’s Move to Directum RX Cuts Paper-Based Document Flow to 10%
By moving its corporate document management to the Center of International Trade (CIT), the organization has cut invoice approval times by more than 40% and reduced the volume of paper documents to almost a minimum.
The CIT has more than 15,000 counterparties, 600 resident companies and a range of business units spanning restaurants, hotels, offices and congress facilities, as well as administration and maintenance. Its document flow is substantial, making paper-based processing inefficient. In addition to moving to electronic document management, the organization needed to fully automate the exchange of financial documents with external counterparties. The move to Directum RX provided the required results.
The Vendor Stays the Same, the Platform Changes
Before moving to the new platform, the CIT had used another product from Russian developer Directum, the Directum 5.5 system, for more than 10 years. Over time, however, it no longer met the organization’s growing needs, while the vendor had developed a new line of digital products for business process management.
Notably, the CIT’s IT team made the switch to the new software without outside assistance. They migrated 180,000 documents and a data set accumulated over 20 years from the old platform to the new one, deployed an electronic archive and trained employees to use the system. It now provides automated workflows for approving contracts, addenda, price lists, work completion certificates and material write-offs, as well as for registering correspondence and recording orders and directives. The software was adapted to the organization’s internal needs by integrating it with packages such as 1C:Upravlenie, 1C:Predpriyatie and 1C:Bukhgalteriya, the SBIS business automation and reporting system, and the Active Directory directory service.
“Automating the flow of financial documents means faster oversight and tracking of contracts and work with counterparties, as well as significant savings in company resources – from lower spending on paper, couriers and archives to other related costs,” said Dmitry Usachev, director of the CIT’s Digital Technologies Center. A year and a half after the migration, the business impact can now be measured in concrete terms: the share of paper-based document flow has fallen from 40% to 10%, while financial approvals have become 41% faster.
The Core of Digital Management
More than 600 of the CIT’s 1,100 employees already work in the Directum RX digital environment. The system is expected to be expanded to new processes in the near future, including the introduction of the Directum HR Pro personnel profile. The electronic document management system (EDMS) is gradually becoming the core of the organization’s digital management.
The project, in particular, points to the maturity of Russia’s IT industry, which is capable of creating ecosystem products for comprehensive corporate management that are compatible with legacy systems and the domestic technology stack, including Linux and Postgres Pro. There is demand for such products. According to estimates from Tensor, by early 2026, Russian EDMS platforms were used by 50–80% of large companies, 30–50% of medium-sized companies and no more than 15% of small and medium-sized businesses. Adoption is higher in the public sector, at 75–80%. That leaves substantial room for further growth.
During the Shift Away From Imported Technology
The ability of Russian platforms to operate successfully in the digital environments of large companies was demonstrated during the large-scale shift away from imported technology. For example, Gazprom Invest deployed Directum RX for 5,000 users in 2022, integrating it into the domestic technology stack. In 2023, another large company, IDS Borjomi, introduced Directum’s artificial intelligence tools to process contracts with counterparties. In 2025, System Electric moved six of its companies in Russia and Belarus to Directum RX, automating work with primary documents and contracts. In 2026, Rosmorport completed the migration of its unified industry-wide system to Russian software. These are not isolated cases. Together, they point to a broad migration to domestic digital EDMS and enterprise content management (ECM) platforms.
Deepening Digitalization
“The market situation has improved significantly: most Russian EDMS platforms are certified for domestic operating systems and database management systems and are being developed using open technologies. Integration issues with Russian systems have essentially been resolved, while standardizing data formats has become a matter of fine-tuning rather than an obstacle,” said Alexander Vorobyov, Product Owner for the Tezis (Thesis) EDMS.
The next step is likely to be a shift from initial deployments toward deeper digitalization, including the integration of financial and personnel archives, HR processes and AI services. Over time, fragmented automation could give way to an ecosystem-based management model built around a digital core.
