Introduction

Roadbridge Ltd. is a Limerick based company with a successful and proven record of accomplishment in civil engineering and building works throughout Ireland. The company has completed major projects to the highest standards of quality for clients in the transport, utilities, commercial, industrial, energy, waste and leisure sectors.

Problem: Physical Paper Distribution

Many individual project sites are in operation at any one time, each of which receives deliveries for their specific project. All invoicing is centralised to the head office, yet each site office needs access to these invoices for approval and auditing.
Historically, a copy of each invoice was posted to each site and the originals archived after processing. This was a laborious process that incurred high postal and copier costs.

Challenge: Accounts Integration

A bespoke accounting package written in VB was already in use to manage the accounting requirements of each site and which stored all invoice details. The new system needed to integrate with this accounting solution and replace the existing physical process of moving paper around the organisation.
The project had three main goals; firstly the accounting system had to automatically attach the accounting information to every scanned invoice. Secondly, the accounting system needed to be able to find and display the invoice image at the touch of a button. Finally, every scanned invoice had to be distributed to the relevant project site office.

Solution

Action Point partnered with Shannon ECM Software Ltd. to develop a robust Document Management desktop application called DocMan. This system was deployed to the accounts payable department and a Zebra barcode printer was installed to print a unique barcode for every invoice. Each invoice is scanned into DocMan, which reads the barcode before saving the invoice to an electronic archive.

Action Point developed both a C# API and a COM API for DocMan to enable third party applications to leverage DocMan’s functionality. The VB accounting application was modified to interface with DocMan via the APIs. This enabled all accounting information to be stored with each scanned invoice and enabled the accounting application to use DocMan’s viewer to display any requested invoice.

Action Point developed and deployed a custom tool that regularly exports all scanned invoice images to a network share, from where they are electronically distributed to the relevant project sites around the country. The result is that within 12 hours of receipt at head office, each and every invoice is available for viewing at the correct project site nationwide.

Technologies Used

C# WinForms, SQL 2005, ZPL, COM, VB 6, DotNetMagic, Visio.

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