Southern Supply is a group of distribution and manufacturing companies headquartered in Springfield, Missouri. The various business units distribute automation and ancillary products to commercial, utility, governmental, and industrial customers throughout the region and manufacture commercial aluminum doors and windows used around the world.
Through some unfortunate experiences, the team at Southern Supply identified the need to prevent their checks sent to vendors from being stolen through fraudulent data editing. The first step to secure their business would be to implement positive pay with their banks—matching checks issued by a company with those presented for payment throughout their various business units.
Southern Supply needed a solution to streamline this process and protect their business from fraudulent activity.
Jesse Owsley is the software project manager at Southern Supply and had the idea to utilize Informer to automate the process of submitting required check information to banks—which took less than a couple of hours to set up for multiple business units running different ERPs.
“Informer is the only tool we have which is capable of doing this. The other solution would be to have separate custom programs, which are expensive and not timely, written for multiple ERPs. Because Informer is ERP-agnostic, we can use the same solution for multiple platforms, and we can do this ourselves,” said Owsley.
Owsley accomplished automation of positive pay by utilizing various features of Informer. One of these features is the ability to schedule Jobs to send emails or FTPs to any address. The ability for a Job to send output only if the query returns required data was also helpful in setting up this process. The aggregate feature was also used to accomplish automation of positive pay.
Informer has helped the company save time, money, and resources through the facilitation of an efficient, automated process that only requires one software solution. This has also assisted in speeding up payment processing times to vendors.