Industry: Energy
Synopsis of Services Provided
Document imaging solution integrated with Oracle Financials running over Citrix.
What the Company Does
The company provides natural gas transportation, processing and storage services and natural gas liquids (NGL’s), fractionation (separation), transportation, storage and import/export terminal services to producers and consumers of natural gas and NGL’s. They are the second largest publicly traded midstream energy partnership in North America with an enterprise value of approximately $6 billion.
The Business Challenge
The company has distributed processing facilities and field operations across a wide geographical territory, with many locations in remote areas. The company was interested in consolidating paper-based documents originating in the field (primarily A/P invoices) and tying them into their Oracle Financials and their content management system for faster order processing.
The iKAN Virtual Document solution
The company had been trying for a long time to implement a document scanning solution that would work in a Citrix Metaframe environment to no avail. One of the biggest hurdles to overcome was being able to actively attach document scanners to PC’s that communicated through the Citrix Metaframe system. iKAN Software solved this with their Virtual Document Center scan module and customized development to allow the system to be invoked through the Oracle Financials Order Entry system. During the process of entering a new Purchase Order into Oracle, users now scan the source document and “attach” it to the Oracle record.
Results
The company has been able to roll the system out to over 300 locations, with additional locations being planned. The solution has replaced two different internal client/server based systems. By allowing documents to be scanned and connected to specific records within Oracle Financials, they have been able to greatly shorten the paperwork processing time between the field and home office, improving decision making, reducing costs, and improving the overall purchasing process.