How WSDOT Leverages ILINX Workflow for Auto-Matching Vouchers & Receipts
Richard Norrell, Washington State Department of Transportation
Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) has a lot of processes where transaction documents are created in a system, printed, processed then scanned into the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system for search and Retention Management. In addition to these documents, there are summary reports that are produced, and in the old days these reports were manually verified to confirm that each transaction document referenced was actually processed and captured in the ECM. Sometimes it would take several days or even weeks for the various geographically dispersed offices of the agency to get the paper documents processed and scanned, so the manual matching process had to be repeated on a daily basis until all documents were present. With the implementation of the new ILINX Capture system this process is now completely automated, only requiring human intervention if documents fail to show up after a designated grace period. Here are some screen shots and explanations of how it all works for the newest implementation, Payment Vouchers.
The ILINX Capture Workflow
The main section of the workflow, shown above, handles the scanning, indexing and processing of the Payment Vouchers and routing of the Register reports into the Register Subflow.
The Register Subflow is where the matching process takes place. This process uses two custom Server Extension ILINX Extension Modules (IXM). The first Server Extension (Parse RAM 0051) takes the Summary Report and parses it into individual rows in a Line Item table. Each line is a reference to one or more documents that require matching. The second Server Extension (RAM Auto Match) reads through the entries in the Line Item table and conducts a search for documents that match the Line Item reference. When documents are found they are updated indicating the Line Item that they match and then the Line Item itself is updated to indicate it has been matched to the documents. After the Auto-Matching is attempted the workflow checks to see if all the Line Items were matched or if the prescribed number of cycles has been attempted. Based on these checks the Register batch will either go into the Pending Match Cycle queue, the Warrant Manual Match queue, or Complete the subflow.
Here is what the actual summary report looks like: As you can see it could be pretty tedious to sit and manually match each of these lines to the documents they represent in the system.
Should a manual review be necessary, a Workflow Form is used. On this form, workflow fields are shown that keep track of how many documents are referenced in each summary report. At a quick glance, the user can see how many documents have been matched, how many are missing and the number of times the workflow has attempted to do the matching process.
The table on the left side of the form shows the documents that have been previously matched, indicated by the padlock icon, and the remaining documents that are available for matching. The table on the right shows all of the documents that are referenced in the report. If manual matching is desired, the user simply selects a document in the left table, not already matched, and presses the Match button on the corresponding line on the right table.
WSDOT has now automated the process of matching several business areas including Payment Vouchers, Journal Vouchers and Cash Receipts. Once documents are matched, the properties on the documents can be used creating a cross reference to the summary report. Also, using the Full Text capabilities of ILINX Content Store, users are now able to research both the summary report information and their corresponding documents without having to return to the source system. In this case, the source system is a mainframe application so the users are really loving that little side benefit.
If you are interested in more details of how these processes work, please contact ImageSource.
Richard Norrell is a Senior ECM Systems Engineer at Washington State Department of Transportation in Olympia, WA. He was instrumental in helping them move from Oracle IPM and Kofax to ILINX technologies for migration, capture, workflow, repository, retention management and COLD processing.
