Flowgear, Africa’s cloud-based integration platform provider, has enabled Upat South Africa to ensure quick and accurate updates of imported goods data into SYSPRO.

Importing thousands of fixing and fixture products for the building industry requires a good system for tracking the whereabouts and costs of the imported products. Upat South Africa, a leading distributor of international building and allied construction brands, had developed such a system, but it also needed to have that data in its SYSPRO ERP to manage the information for sales and accounting purposes.

“In the type of sales environment we operate in, the quicker a product is available on SYSPRO, the quicker it can be sold,” said Wayne Weber, Operations Manager at Upat SA.

Initially the update process was done manually and could take over a week. It involved getting data from consignments, comprising actual stock items and counts, and costs allocated against suppliers and other agents, then capturing that into SYSPRO. By implementing a workflow on the Flowgear integration platform, the time to update data from a container delivery into SYSPRO took less than two hours.

Using Flowgear, the process of querying Upat SA’s imports system is automated and a Flowgear workflow is triggered whenever new data is detected. This has enabled the company to use its existing staff in far more useful ways than just entering data.

“It’s the best investment I ever made,” commented Weber.

Having proved the value of Flowgear in one business area, Upat SA are planning for the next phase – to automate the process of updating inventory picking and packing data into invoices.