JD Edwards – Automated Check Reconciliation for a Food Company

Ephlux steps in to add the magic ingredient of automation into the Check Reconciliation Process that the Food Company has longed to have improved!

Story:

Serving the nation for over a century, this esteemed food manufacturer has successfully provided innovative, best-in-class products blended with the industry’s absolute best service. With unmatched qualities of Leadership, Sustainability and Expertise, this company has grown to establish itself in the US as the ideal partner for retailers and food service organizations alike.

But with great power, comes great responsibility. Working arduously in the grease kitchen of this huge food company is the Accounts Payable Department that has a ton of responsibility. The organization wished to automate the Check Reconciliation Process, which allows the Accounts Payable Department to reconcile the checks produced to the cleared check records from the bank.

A lot of steps were involved in the reconciliation process that was underway, and these were as follows:

1. Log onto their Bank’s portal
2. Manually download the monthly report
3. Employ it for check reconciliation, including the cleared checks for Accounts Payable that were within AS400
4. Reformat the file
5. Save to the organization’s network folder
6. Validate the format to match AS400
7. Import the file and reconcile it

A lot of time would be consumed in doing the above processes manually, and so the company wished to have these processes automated. In essence, the import of the R12 file integration with JDE was to be automated and Ephlux, with its pantry of experience, was ready to provide a scrumptious solution.

Challenges:

To make things ready-to-use, interactive and convenient for the user, a lot of work has to be done at the back-end. An automated system would definitely add to the business value of the organization by saving up on time, manpower and human errors too.
A well-integrated system was to be designed that could read from an AS400 based network drive and ensure proper transfer of file to various stages: Inbound, Processing, Archive. To ensure that the ins and outs of the process help the CNC have a better control over the data was another test at hand.

Exception error handling was to be taken care of, with appropriate messages that would identify the issues with the input file accurately and rectify them prior to execution. For this purpose, an R55 was written and Custom Processing options were also to be incorporated.

Solution:

An extensive study of the organization’s requirements, flow of processes, and analysis of the historical data made it easier for Ephlux to design the perfect “Check Reconciliation Process”. A multitude of options for the front-end-application were presented to the organization and the best suited for their operations was selected and designed.
The customized R55 Program that was able to import the R12 files based on the required format from the network folder and then plug them into the specific tables was a milestone and provided the Accounts Payable Department a competitive advantage, in terms of time, convenience and accuracy.

Ephlux also managed to execute a standard R09501 program to convert the imported data into the respected JDE tables that made the database an informative set of tables, as opposed to the previous jumbled data.

The Project was a successful reconciliation in itself, that achieved with the right minds working together to put up a masterpiece – ensuring that the business goals were met by the organization!