Workforce

Workforce Holdings Limited, a JSE listed company, is a large diversified group of companies offering an extensive range of inter-related solutions for human resource delivery and management. They offer solutions for a broad base of industry sectors both locally and internationally, with offices throughout South Africa.

Overview

Workforce engaged Alltek and IMan to overhaul a number of existing integrations between their various applications. The key requirements for IMan were to improve data quality, provide robust integration and a means to reconcile the data being transferred.

Integrated data load into Sage300 ERP

The first reworked integration was between Workforce’s internally developed payment solution, Paymatic, and Sage300 ERP. An existing integration had been written but suffered from several problems: data omissions; was unable to track tax requirements; data duplicates were frequent; and the reconciliation was inadequate.

Solution

• Transactions are imported into the Sage300 ERP G/L module using the Sage300 ERP API from an intermediate staging table.
• Checks for duplicated data against the transactions’ reference using IMan’s flexible lookup functions. Duplicates where identified are filtered from the dataset, and Workforce’s accounts department are alerted via email.
• Handle volume of 5,000 lines of G/L transactions per day.

IMan has been able to: dramatically reduce duplicated data; improve data quality by integrating using the Sage300 ERP API; and provide Workforce with a significantly improved reconciliation.

ABSA Bank – Automating the EFT process

The electronic payment upload from Paymatic to ABSA bank is a critical operation for Workforce. The sensitive nature and the high volume of 30,000 payments per week require that it run smoothly every time. Workforce’s previous integration however, was a serious pain-point, requiring significant staff involvement where poor data quality could cause major automation issues. Payments originating from Sage300 ERP also required manual processing.

IMan provides a common integration point to ABSA for both Paymatic and Sage300 ERP, delivering a much more robust solution:

• A general data quality improvement, eradicating the previous automation issues.
• Payments are checked for duplicates where an email alert is sent to Workforce’s accounts department on identification.
• All payments originating from Sage300 ERP have remittance advices emailed directly to the supplier. Using conditional logic configured into the workflow, suppliers with invalid or no email address have their remittances routed to the accounts staff responsible.
• Provide a reconciliation detailing the completed EFTs with the corresponding bank reference.

IMan has been able to markedly improve a key operation for Workforce by removing problematic data & subsequent processing errors and enforcing better auditing & controls.

Procurement Invoice Upload

IMan has replaced a previously manual data entry process by providing an automated data upload/import from Workforce’s internal procurement system into Sage300 ERP.

The process retrieves completed purchase invoices from the procurement system, consolidates them by account, which are then loaded as Sage300 ERP A/P Invoice Batch before finally an audit email is sent to the accounts department.

Once again IMan has been able to save significant time and improve data quality.

ETL – Cashflow Data Warehouse

Finally, IMan has been deployed to load Workforce’s cashflow data warehouse. IMan extracts data from several disparate sources, transforms the data in-memory into a common shape & form, before writing it to the data warehouse/cube.

Outcome

IMan has been able to improve operational efficiency by dramatically improving data quality across several applications at Workforce. It has done this by reducing duplicated & omitted data, enforcing Sage300 ERP business logic via API integration and improved auditing & alerting.

With IMan impressing thus far, Workforce have already started planning several other projects.