As part of the digitization of business processes, invoices sent in digital form by suppliers are to be automatically imported into an apron system of the merchandise management system at the German retail affiliate of a global group. The current process involves a great deal of manual effort on the part of the IT department. The task is to record the requirements, design an automated process, carry out the implementation and train the specialist departments.
Supplement
The core of the solution is the process-controlled processing of invoices. Since many small and medium-sized suppliers cannot guarantee the transmission of invoices in EDI format (Electronic Data Interchange), the processing of text, csv and Excel files is forced. The technical basis of the solution is the Microsoft SQL Server, which already acts as a database for the systems involved. With the help of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), the invoice files are read in, validated and imported into an apron system of the merchandise management system Navision. Here the invoice verification can be carried out by the accounting department. Microsoft Access is used here as a pure front-end application, via which the specialist departments can intervene in the processing and export the invoices to the merchandise management system. All functional logics are treated as abstraction layers via the database.
Subject description
The aim is to avoid manual intervention by the IT department during the import. The specialist departments are to be enabled to carry out all necessary steps independently (master data maintenance, invoice verification, etc.). The sent supplier invoices cannot be imported into the enterprise resource planning system unseen, but must be subjected both to an automated validation (articles in the master data available, purchase and sales prices for the period of the invoice maintained, etc.) and a visual examination (invoice examination). The manual effort has to be reduced to a minimum.