Industry: Distribution
Adding a new member to your organization’s software “team” isn’t always an easy move to make. Sometimes the new addition doesn’t play well with others or is more work to incorporate into business processes than anticipated. However, when that new team member easily steps in and meshes with established systems and actually enhances the overall IT environment, it’s a winning combination.
GoAnywhere MFT and Automate from HelpSystems are two software solutions that do work seamlessly together to add additional efficiency to business processes. Trans Am Piping Products, Ltd., a distributor of carbon steel piping components serving western Canada, found out that the two solutions created a singular, more secure way to do business with its customers with less impact on staff.
MFT Delivers More Than Just Secure File Sharing Capabilities
“We initially sought out a managed file transfer (MFT) solution as we needed to satisfy a requirement of one of our customers – that their invoices be sent to them via secure FTP with its encryption and authentication technology,” said Gordon Schneider, Computer Consultant for Trans Am Piping Products. Before this request, the company primarily sent invoices via email and fax.
As Schneider compared possible MFT options, “We found that GoAnywhere was priced right for the needs we had at the time,” he noted. GoAnywhere automates and secures file transfers using a centralized enterprise-level approach. No special programming or scripts are involved in deploying the solution and most users can be up and running in a matter of hours.
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Incorporating MFT software saves time and money, improves security, simplifies server-to-server file transfers, and helps meet compliance, vendor, or customer requirements. Schneider found that in addition to file transfers, they use the capabilities of GoAnywhere primarily for reading emails from customers and vendors. “The ability of the software to parse out text data is invaluable to us,” he noted. “We are able to process most customer EFT payment advices and vendor invoices no matter what format they are sent in.” With GoAnywhere, organizations needing EDI file translation can easily read, write, map, and move X12 and XML files between databases. No separate EDI or ETL tools are needed with managed file transfer.
Automate Adds OCR Capabilities
After about two years of successfully working with GoAnywhere for file transfers and file translations, Trans Am Piping added Automate, in part because there were some EFT payment details or advices and vendor invoices that they could not read the data from by other methods. Automate is HelpSystems' Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution. “We were spending at least several hours each week dedicated to trying to extract the necessary information,” noted Schneider. “We zeroed in on the Automate solution as we wanted a tool that could economically provide OCR (optical character recognition) functionality."
“Automate OCRs our image PDFs and sends them to GoAnywhere as a text file for further processing. The two solutions work well together to complete the tasks we ask of them and it’s reduced the workload of our accounting staff. Automate gives us the ability to increase the number of customer and vendor documents we process in GoAnywhere,” added Schneider.
Combining the assets of the two software solutions has saved Trans Am Piping time, money, and resources. The potential to utilize one or both systems for additional business processes is there, “and it’s great to see that the products are being enhanced on a regular basis,” added Schneider.
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