MEA outsourced its invoicing to another company. This third-party company sends invoices to MEA’s customers and shares the data via a zip folder on an SFTP server. The file is then downloaded, unzipped, and loaded to an MS SQL transactional system. The zip folder contains different types of structured and unstructured files, including CSV, PDFs and flat files. Without an automation tool, the team at MEA had to download the individual files, build flows, and execute the integration process manually. The users would often have to handle files holding up to millions of records, making the entire integration process extremely time consuming. This also meant that invoicing reports could only be generated once employees were physically available at work to download files and execute the integration process.

Filtering relevant data out of files with millions of records was also a challenge. MEA only wanted to insert records that had been changed or updated into the MS SQL transactional system. This took a lot of time and effort since the organization lacked a tool to facilitate the process.