30 January 2014
The UK Forestry Commission had engaged in a project to integrate its Oracle-based Cedar eFinancials system with its Serengeti document management system. This would allow an image of all financial documents held in Serengeti to be accessed from within the finance system.
The process required that all images in Serengeti were appropriately indexed against the relevant transaction in the financial system through pre-defined metadata. While this was achieved relatively easily for ‘outgoing’ documents, i.e. those created by the finance system, it was not the case for ‘incoming’ documents such as purchase invoices. These needed to be scanned and the appropriate financial transaction reference applied to extract the required metadata.
The scanning of purchase invoices required a significant amount of manual intervention to scan the invoices and identify and extract the metadata. The original process was laborious and error-prone and checking that proper indexation had been applied could only take place after the document was actually uploaded.
Furthermore, purchase invoices were still processed manually at up to 100 sites throughout the Forestry Commission.
