How We Became Mr Fixit to Solve a Customer’s ERP Problem

While GoAnywhere is at core a Managed File Transfer solution, its many advanced features make it useful in lots of other ways. 

Take, for example, the way we were able to use it to help one of our customers wrestling with deficiencies in their ERP system.   

FMCG Fix 

This customer — a well-regarded manufacturer of perishable fast moving consumer goods — is critically dependant on legacy ERP software to accept, analyse and prepare invoices for incoming customer orders.  Their ERP system aggregates these orders and alerts suppliers to the quantities of ingredients necessary for the business to fulfil each day’s orders.  It also invoices customers for the orders they’ve placed. 

However, our customer was experiencing an increasingly prevalent problem.  Their ERP software was mishandling orders and invoices where customers had changed their mind and amended their order after they’d already been invoiced. 

Every time the ERP system mishandled one of these amended orders, our customer’s dispatch staff would need to have an IT department colleague manually fix the problem.  This was taking 20 minutes each time.  And as their business continued to grow, what had once been a minor inconvenience was turning into a major time sink and drain on efficiency. 

Worse, not only were the manual order corrections wasting more and more valuable employee time, but sometimes, suppliers found themselves unable to provide the additional quantities of ingredients requested too late in the day. 

Overseas vendor – underdone service 

Of course, our customer’s first call was to their global ERP software vendor. However, that vendor wouldn’t commit to fixing the deficiency in their software until a future version release, many months away.   

Our customer needed a workaround until then.  

GoAnywhere to the Rescue 

Our customer called us to see whether we could help.  And, being locally available and committed to providing excellent customer support, we found a way to do so — quickly! 

Our expert technician was able to cleverly leverage GoAnywhere’s advanced flexibility in an unexpected way.  His solution lay in a novel use of GoAnywhere’s “Secure Forms” functionality. 

Secure Forms 

Briefly, GoAnywhere’s Secure Forms enable a business to collect sensitive data and files through customisable, web-based forms, securely transmitted via HTTPS. These forms can be tailored with specific input fields, labels, and file upload components.  When submitted, these Forms trigger a GoAnywhere Project — an automated workflow which processes the input, handles file transfers, and returns output files or confirmation messages to users. They streamline data intake, reduce reliance on email or fax, and ensure secure, standardised submissions easily usable by other IT systems. 

Our technician was able to utilise GoAnywhere’s Secure Forms because they use JDBC (Java Data Base Connectivity) to transfer data from a variety of IT systems to SQL databases. That’s a commonly used kind of database, and unsurprisingly, was the kind of database used by our customer’s legacy ERP system.   

We were able to leverage GoAnywhere’s functionality to automatically update pricing and order quantities and recalculate totals, enabling invoices to be correctly amended and re-processed.   

It took us just a few days to design, test and implement this fix. And our happy customer was able to get on with what they were best at: growing their business and creating ever more happy customers of their own! 

Here to Help  

At Generic Systems Australia we’re on the ground in your time zone and ready to help your Australian or NZ organisation take advantage of GoAnywhere MFT’s incredibly flexible capabilities. 

As experts in Managed File Transfer solutions, we’ve assisted businesses of all sizes to protect their customer data and secure their file transfers, keeping their operations running smoothly. 

If you’d like to discuss how we can help you, please feel welcome to contact me.  I’m always happy to have an obligation-free chat and explain how simply we can help you.