A Fortune 100 Company, wished to improve tracking of, and invoice payments from, the thousands of companies with which it did business. Their goal was to securely present listings of complete invoices, organized by company, through an extranet. The companies would review all moneys owed and schedule electronic payments.
Implementation Solution
Complicated systems and applications had to be integrated between the Company and its billing service provider to achieve this goal. The Company operated on an NT system running Microsoft's IIS web server, while its' bank used Sun Microsystems Solaris. The list of unpaid invoices had to be supplied in a format that would securely integrate into the service provider's network.
In order to assure reliability the systems implementation was required to accomplish the following:
- Wrote an ActiveX control for the NT system that would initiate a secure, web-based channel of communication with the providers interface to verify the transaction commitment. A log was created in ActiveX to keep an audit trail for the Company.
- Developed a listener service for the Solaris side to authenticate the ActiveX communication and perform the necessary business logic that determined if the parameters of the transaction were correct. When all requirements were satisfied, the transaction was committed to the Payment Systems database. The Oracle component dealt with reporting, data warehousing, error-correction, and logging all activity to ensure that an audit trail was maintained for the client.
- Communicated with the bank's mainframe to import critical customer information such as account numbers.
- Generated an X.12 file that was used to perform the electronic funds transfer.
- Developed a management front-end for the bank to perform general housekeeping and reconcile discrepancies.
The entire project lasted for 4 months. The bank and the Company discovered new features, difficulties and opportunities as the project progressed.
Benefits
The project has been a success for the client allowing the AP department to take additional discounts, eliminate duplicate checks and check fraud, improve management information and reduce errors.
Case Study: Solution Vendor Product Improvement
Client Profile
E-Payment Solution Provider: A leader in the electronic payment services industry which develops hardware and software for fully automated payment processing and electronic funds transfer systems. They are a full service provider, offering hosted invoice and settlement services, connectivity, training, support, and maintenance.
Client Situation
The client´s development team had developed a number of electronic payment solutions for various Point of Sale register platforms as well as Stand Beside systems. The client wanted to enter the commercial invoice presentment and payments arena and was seeking expertise as to how to design the product offering. Prior to roll-out of this new product set for the corporate market, our client needed to develop new End User Requirements to support the new system.
Implementation Solution
To supplement their existing technical development efforts driven by their development team, the team was hired to provide the technical expertise and business analysis skills to develop the end user requirements for their proprietary electronic payment systems. Our advisors were able to promptly develop the materials needed to support their new payment application, which enabled the client to focus on their sales and marketing efforts.
Benefits
PayStream's Advisors provided their client with the technical assistance to develop the End User flows, documentation, and on-line Manuals, thus allowing their development team to focus their efforts on technical design. Since our advisors and business analysts had previous experience with treasury functions and electronic payment systems, minimal time was needed from the development team of subject matter experts. This allowed our client to concentrate on the marketing aspect of the new products while our advisors handled the complete development of their requirements materials.
