E-business with a paper trail

Building on feedback from transaction processing customers such as Home Depot, Optika is providing links between electronic and paper-based documents. The latest release of Optika's document management system e-Media allows the addition of specific modules for handling XML Internet forms, EDI transactions, and ERP processes.

Calling these options E2e Business Paks, Optika is looking to exploit its document management experience into the exploding e-commerce market.

"Historically, people, process, and transactions have been separate and disparate," said Steve Maegdlin, VP of marketing with Optika "But paper doesn't go away in an electronic environment. These E2e Paks manage those disparate systems as companies move from their existing environment to eBusiness."

The E2e Business Paks are built with technology licensed from business partners including: EDI technology from Harbinger, XML technology from UWI.com and ERP integration from J.D. Edwards.

Maegdlin suggests that the many organizations entering e-commerce concern themselves with only with Web-based sale. Optika sees a great need for handling the transaction well after the sale is made.

"EDI and XML do a great job of conducting the transaction, but there's no storage and no context to supporting documents," he said. "Once you conduct a transaction, then what? The order goes somewhere, and does something. We don't conduct the transaction, we enable it."

In addition to offering an enhanced architecture to accommodate these E2e Business Paks, Release 1.5 of eMedia offers more enterprise capability. For example, rather than requiring business partners across an extranet to be issued internal system access, Maegdlin explained that eMedia can now allow "trusted domains" to be included in a workflow routing. This feature is especially helpful in an accounting environment, where suppliers can include support details that might explain discrepancies.

"Accounts payable is classic example of a mixed environment," said Maegdlin. "Invoices come into an organization as paper then get captured electronically." However, he pointed out that supporting information might be in the form of a note scribbled on a Bill of Lading, or in an e-mail

"The Web has made it even more important to distribute information to business partners and customers," Maegdlin said. "But there's still a lot of paper that comes into an organization due to a lack of appropriate business process."

Using the EDI Business Pak will allow eMedia users to access EDI data at the transaction level. Historically, EDI systems were difficult to access from a desktop. If a transaction was found to be out-of-tolerance, users had to sift through streams of data in order to find the individual transaction in question. Even then, supporting information that might explain the discrepancy was stored in a separate document management repository. Optika promises the new Business Pak will allow these sorts of issues to be resolved directly at the desktop.

E2e Paks are add-on components to the core eMedia product, pricing at $47,500 for EDI, $37, 980 for Internet Forms and $35,000 for ERP