MIBAR customizes ERP systems to meet specific business needs. We do it well. We’ve been at it since (what seems like) the dawn of time. Now, its 2020, ERP systems get more robust every day. System vendors work tirelessly to make systems that can be customized with little or no programming. Seasoned pro’s like us had to shift our focus. Remaining strong and relevant meant learning how to communicate. I decided to become a communication expert.
A lot of customers have systems that can’t or wont talk to each other. We teach these products to talk to each other. One customer uses routing software to handle delivery manifests. Every day they had to print delivery receipts and scan them into a document management system. The process was prone to error and tedious. One person printed the receipts, and another was responsible for scanning them into the system. Keeping these systems communicating was costing time and money.
Enter the communication experts, stage right. MIBAR created a document handler to teach the systems to communicate. Time to take off my disguise, fire up the laptop, we have a job to do. We met with the tech team at the routing software company and learned they had an API to handle this. Next we were in contact with the vendor of the document management system to learn how to automate the scanning process. We learned they had an API that allows documents to be imported as if they were scanned.
First job was to figure out what orders were delivered and get a delivery receipt for each one. The API allows us to download the orders delivered for a given day. We then made a subsequent HTTP call to retrieve the delivery receipt and store it as PDF. Finally, an additional HTTP call returned a list of orders that couldn’t be delivered. The status of each order was communicated back to their ERP system so management could easily view where the status of an order.
Last part of this task and the home run was to import (scan) the documents. The document management software had a utility that polled a folder and imported the files. In this case, we needed to keep it simple. So, we created a script using PowerShell to handle calling the import utility and moving the documents to a “done” folder. Finally, we used a scheduled PowerShell script to remove old documents.
The result, we taught these two disparate systems to communicate. Orders get delivered via the routing software and delivery receipts get downloaded and imported into the document management system nightly. Moreover, our customer got the document management system they needed to continue to grow.
If your business processes need a “communication expert” give us a call. We got this. At MIBAR, we’ve spent nearly three decades making ERP software work for our clients and know what it takes to complete a project successfully. Schedule a consultation to learn more.
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