Background
GaP Solutions is a point-of-sale and retail management software developer, systems integrator, and supplier of supermarket, food processing, and weighing equipment. Based in Australia, the company is recognized as the foremost innovator of retail solutions. GaP Solutions provides custom software and hardware solutions to clients across a range of industries. The company has installed more than 4,000 POS (point of sale) systems in 1,000 stores all over Australia.
Use Case
GaP Solutions received around 3,000 invoice variations from vendors in various formats. These invoices contained unstructured data that needed to be transformed into a structured format, i.e., columns and rows, for further processing. GaP had to process 6,000-10,000 invoice files in various formats monthly. Users needed to manually input invoice data into their store systems for payment processing, reporting, analysis, etc. Since every vendor invoice had a different structure and layout, employees also had to enter the text fields manually.
GaP Solutions wanted to automate the entire process, so the invoice was automatically extracted and loaded into the system for reporting and analytics.
We really wanted to steer away from a manned operation to go to an unmanned automated system. And that’s where we found Astera to have the ability to do that.
Enter Astera
After trying multiple data management tools, GaP Solutions selected Astera.
GaP Solutions had a complex flow when it came to invoice processing automation. It involved several artifacts and required native, fast connectivity to cloud storage and remote connections. They were able to find a holistic solution with Astera that catered to all aspects of their data extraction process. They also needed engineers to guide them through building and implementing the solution. They turned to Astera’s professional services.
So, we can put a document in there [Astera], it identifies what it is, and send it down and assign workflows to process that document in a timely manner, as a result we get back the structured data. So that's the biggest powerful option that the software has. And one of the largest cost benefits, and we know it, once it's set up, it works 100% of the time, it just works all the time.
Astera’s template-based extraction allowed GaP to capture defined fields from each invoice, such as invoice ID, vendor name, total cost, and a table for breakdown of cost. The company could reuse the report model for invoices that shared the same structure and layout. Using Astera’s built-in transformations, GaP easily manipulated and transformed data in the desired format. GaP was able to ensure that the extracted data was accurate and complete by applying custom validation checks.
We export PDF documents to Amazon S3. So, at a click of a button, we can just assign the workflow and offload everything straight to Amazon, which is really cool.
GaP also created several automation workflows and scheduled them to run daily, which ensured that data was always available for payment processing and reporting. The company also set up a master database and created a workflow allowing Astera to look up order IDs and fix missing data fields accordingly. This ensured that their output would be available in the standardized format (XML), even though data came from 3,000 different invoice layouts.
With existing systems that we've implemented, the data extraction jobs are done manually, which could take days to enter all the invoices, or it's done through our other system that normally takes up to 24 hours to receive an invoice back in a standard structured format for us to process. But if we use Astera, most of it takes three minutes.
GaP used Astera to complete the integration process overnight and make the data available in a report-ready format before the start of the workday. This saved the team hours that used to be spent manually downloading and executing the integration flows. Now, GaP can perform analyses quicker and reach insights faster.
The support and implementation of the product has been great, and the staff at Astera have really done a good job helping us with the implementation of it