Background 

GaP Solutions is a point of sale and retail management software developer, systems integrator, supermarket, food processing, and weighing equipment supplier. 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 contain unstructured data that needs 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.   

Enter Astera ReportMiner 

“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.”  

– John Goodacre, Director GaP Solutions   

After trying multiple data management softwares, GaP Solutions selected Astera ReportMiner. 

GaP Solutions had a complex flow when it came to invoice processing. It involved several artifacts and required a native and fast connectivity to cloud storages and remote connections. They were able to find a holistic solution with Astera ReportMiner 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. 

ReportMiner’s template-based extraction allowed GaP to capture set 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 ReportMiner’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.  

“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”  

– John Goodacre, Director GaP Solutions 

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 ReportMiner 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 3000 different invoice layouts.  

GaP used ReportMiner 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. Previously, processing an invoice took 24 hours, but ReportMiner cut down this time to under three minutes. Now, GaP can perform analyses quicker and reach insights faster.