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Custom data migration module development for IntelliChief paperless process management

IntelliChief integration link – data migration solution development

The inability to automatically and completely render all information from paper documents has always been considered the weakest aspect of modern ERPs and CRMs. The same can be said about the difficulties with automatic data transfer between enterprise applications.

is a leading company developing a Paperless Process Management (PPM) solution, with headquarters in Boston, US. IntelliChief’s mission is to eliminate those obstacles on the enterprises’ road to complete digital transformation.

Existek has created a software library that allows IntelliChief Integration Link software to communicate with some third-party ERP software, including IBM Maximo, Salesforce, Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, SAGE, and SAP. The project involved identifying different controls and extracting data from them, which is then transferred to IntelliChief software for processing.

Project technology stack

C#, .NET

Timeframe and workload

2 months, 1 developer full-time, 1 developer part-time

Challenge

IntelliChief reached out to Existek as an expert in creating custom screen scraping and text capturing solutions that work across both desktop and web applications. Our previous experience in building assistive software for reading and writing helped us address the unique challenges that IntelliChief has faced on its way to creating a new product.

The idea behind IntelliChief Integration Link is simple, yet complex to achieve on the technical level. Integration Link is intended to work like middleware between a third-party ERP and IntelliChief, allowing Paperless Process Management solutions to: scan the screens of desktop applications or web applications in the browser window; recognize the data, forms and fields; and send this data to the PPM application for further processing and storage.

Following is a short list of features and functionality our clients required us to implement in our solution for IntelliChief Integration Link:

Capture, scan and index the windows of any applications, including ERPs and enterprise software as a document to the IntelliChief Paperless Process Management solution.
Extract information from the windows of any applications running on the PC with installed and launched IntelliChief Integration Link, such as ERPs and enterprise solutions, and index it to the archive referred to the user’s applications window.
Browse and view the documents referred to the ERP/enterprise application.

Solution

IntelliChief Integration Link is a desktop application designed to run locally on each PC used for work with the ERP. At the same time, it must capture text from both web applications and desktop applications.

The best solution for that challenge was to capture the data with standard Windows functionality such as accessibility. We have created a custom dll library to be integrated with the base IntelliChief solution and enabled it to recognize the forms, texts, numbers and attachments in browser and desktop applications windows. Proper functioning of the systems wasn’t possible without recognizing the type of application currently on the screen or in the browser window (if this is an ERP, then what kind of ERP, etc.). Therefore, we added this functionality too. As a result, our custom solution was able to determine which application was on the screen and bind the received data to the archive related to this particular application (e.g., Salesforce, IBM Maximo) in the IntelliChief Paperless Process Management system for further processing, integration and transfer to other business software if needed. The received data could automatically be imported to any other supported business application at the moment IntelliChief recorded it to the related archive or later with the help of the same library.

Impact

The required functionality was implemented to IntelliChief Integration Link leveraging standard Windows tools such as accessibility, which guaranteed high reliability, stability and the accuracy of the received data.

One of the biggest advantages is that working with it required very few programming skills. The end user was able to work with the solution while barely noticing the complex scripts running in the background. Interaction with the functions implemented in Integration Link was possible via hotkey combinations or mouse clicks on the button (e.g., Scan/Import) integrated into the data source application interface. Moreover, considering that Integration Link is now able to recognize the application windows and forms in those windows to save the data about that application, users can create their own scenarios of data transfer by selecting fields, assigning attributes to those windows and selecting the actions that should be performed with the data in those windows (e.g., capturing the data in the browser window and seamlessly copying it to the fields of the desktop application launched on that PC with a combination of hotkeys).