Customised Software Development

The Challenge

Our client uses a system to keep track of car park usage by account holders and invoice those account holders on their usage (account holders include taxis, buses, our client’s employees and their clients’ employees). An account holder may have multiple cards, each is associated with a staff member and these cards are scanned every time the staff member uses the car park.

The car park system they use was developed in the United States of America and the invoices it generates are set out in accordance with US standards, a format that is not suitable for the New Zealand environment. This meant that generating the monthly invoices for account holders was a lengthy process. The car park system generated the invoices, they were printed, given to Accounts who re-entered the invoice information into their accounting package and the accounting package regenerated the invoices in an appropriate format. The supporting transaction statements were also generated in the car park system, printed, given to Accounts where they were photocopied (for their records) and posted to the account holders with the regenerated invoices. This process was taking up to a day to complete each month.

The New Zealand supplier for the car park system told our client it would cost US$25,000 (approximately NZ$38,000) to change the invoice to meet their requirements.

The RO Solution

Using SQL Data Transformation, Ripped Orange has written a programme that automatically exports the transactions from the cark park system in to a CSV file at the beginning of every month. An automatic email is sent to accounting staff, who import the CSV file into their accounting package and generate the invoices. Formatting the CSV file in Microsoft Excel provides the transaction statements, which are posted out with the invoices.

The Benefits

How much has the client saved by using Ripped Orange?

The Ripped Orange solution cost less than NZ$5,000 – a mere eighth of the cost quoted by the supplier, this saved our client approximately $32,000.

The process now takes up to 1.5 hours instead of one business day: an ongoing saving to our client.

Error reduction

Ripped Orange’s development projects have a strong validation component. During the validation phase of this project we found a discrepancy between the invoices the car park system created and the invoices generated via the Ripped Orange system. Ripped Orange discovered this was because the car park system did not allow for a staff member, associated with a card, changing during the month. When this happened, the car park system assigned the whole month’s charges to the former cardholder and did not charge the new cardholder for their part month usage.

The new system ensures that this error does not occur and that cardholders are charged for actual usage.