P & R Electrical
When P & R Electrical Wholesalers purchased FormTrap in November of 2001, they planned to migrate the delivery of 500 documents per month from traditional mail to electronic methods (fax/email). By October of 2002, they were delivering almost 3,300 documents per month electronically. By the end of February 2003, they estimate that this number will have grown to over 4,000. Already FormTrap has far outweighed their expectations and looks set to continue doing so.
Customers have been able to choose to receive documents as a PDF attachment via email, as a fax message or to continue receiving them via traditional mail. With FTSpooler, P & R have been able to define all this to happen automatically. Furthermore, faxes can be sent during off-peak times to limit costs both financially and on system traffic, or delivered during more "user-friendly" hours for smaller home-office customers.
FormTrap is still running on the same Pentium II machine on which it was initially installed. There has even been the addition of two remote printers. Yet FormTrap is still operating with the same ongoing success.
From November 2001:
When Geoff Sax, IT Manager at P & R Electrical Wholesalers of Adelaide was told about FormTrap he thought it might solve a few problems, especially in the areas of document presentation and electronic delivery. Starting with an online demonstration from Sydney-based authors, TCG Information Systems, he liked what he saw and approved a more detailed investigation.
The company downloaded trial software from the Web site and Craig Ogilvie started designing forms and experimenting with the product until they had convinced themselves of its utility. A combined installation and training session followed in October and the results impress Geoff and his management.
"We find it very easy to use and are learning more each time we use it", he said. "It took a while to get the feel of it, but now it is coming together nicely and we'll take it with us when we eventually replace the VAX system".
P & R are progressively replacing all of their reports with their FormTrap equivalents. "We've cut out printing internal reports, delivering them via the net as PDF files converted from FormTrap outputs", he said.
P & R are faxing invoice reprints documents and are currently designing remittance advice, invoice and statement forms, which should be ready for use by Christmas. "We're even using Substitution", said Geoff. The FormTrap substitution facility allows the insertion of information and graphics from external files at runtime based on fields appearing in the input data.
"In summary", says Geoff, "it's just wonderful, and we run it on an old Pentium II - 266 [MHz] with under one second delivery times from entry of an invoice to the VAX through to the start of printing".
P & R Electrical run the Windows FormTrap FTSpooler with document splitter, WinFax PRO interface, email interface and delivery to just the one printer. Other printers will come on line later. Data is delivered from the VAX using the standard line printer daemon.
P & R Electrical Wholesalers are stockists of a wide range of the leading brands of electrical products. Visit P & R Electrical's website at http://www.pr-electrical.com.au.
