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Solution Overview

Client Profile

Datalogics is a leading provider of innovative document solutions to Fortune 500 publishers, printers and other companies that need to produce a large volume of high quality documents. This diverse customer base produces an equally broad series of billing challenges.

Challenge

Datalogics was utilizing custom software with an antiquated user interface to handle many different types of orders, each with unique revenue recognition issues. The Datalogics business information system was expensive to maintain, complex to use and difficult to improve.

Solution

BPS designed and implemented a solution that enables Datalogics to more accurately track and recognize revenue, proactively manage projects, and provide management with real-time access to information. Staff training and knowledge transfer conducted by BPS has allowed the client to handle its own support and all subsequent system customization work.

Datalogics

You May Not Know Their Name, But You've Seen Their Work

Chicago-based Datalogics has been a leader in high-speed pagination, database publishing and simultaneous print and electronic production of complex, high-end publications. An Adobe portfolio company and the key channel partner for Adobe PDF library and PDF Job Ready, the company serves large enterprises—such as publishers—that produce high quality documents on a very large scale.

A broad array of customers—and customer needs—means that Datalogics must meet a series of difficult accounting challenges. Revenue from off-the-shelf software sales must be recognized immediately. Custom software is either produced on a time and materials basis, or for a fixed price. Software maintenance revenue may be billed annually or monthly.

In-house Solution Went Only So Far

Previously, Datalogics was not able to find an accounting solution capable of handling these billing challenges, thus wrote a package internally using standard relational database tools. While this program met the company's billing needs, it was expensive to maintain, difficult for users trained in a Windows-only operating system, and nearly impossible to integrate with new features and productivity improvements offered by each new generation of packaged software.

Vice President of Finance and Administration Ruth Walker evaluated all of the leading mid-market business software packages and determined that Microsoft Business Solutions-Solomon was the solution that would satisfy every type of order and revenue recognition requirement without any compromise or customization. But choosing a software package was only the start. She needed a consulting partner who could align that software's features with her unique business processes.

BPS System Designed to Cuts Costs Today, Meet Challenges
Tomorrow

With the assistance of BPS consultants, Walker configured the order entry, recurring invoice and project accounting processes to handle the company's various order types and automatically recognize revenue.

  • Microsoft Business Solutions-Solomon's Order Management module now streamlines the process so billing revenue is recognized as soon as the order is posted. This automation of order processing saves more than 100 hours in accounting expense each month.
  • Project accounting functionality allows employees to electronically record time on projects and route timecards to managers for approval. "This capability saves us about 80 hours per month that we previously spent keyboarding timecards," Walker Says.
  • Further, by integrating Business Intelligence applications into the financial management solution, Datalogics has saved even more hours by allowing managers to access Crystal Reports from each desktop.
  • BPS, a Microsoft Business Solutions Certified Partner, also provided invaluable training and knowledge transfer. "The value that was unique to this reseller is that BPS trained us so we could handle our own support and customization," Walker says.

Indeed, BPS's deep understanding of the business processes underneath the technology resulted in a solution that not only met specific accounting challenges, but was designed to be scaleable, integrated and ready to evolve as Datalogics grows its business.

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