Document output platform
An ERP software vendor resold a document-output engine, shared the revenue with its maker, and could not get the features its customers kept asking for. Roy rebuilt the engine in-house in a few months, built a visual designer so business users could shape their own invoices, orders and statements on top of Microsoft Dynamics, AX and SAP, and went on to lead the product as technical manager and product owner over twelve engineers.
Replaced a resold engine with an in-house one, ending the revenue share with the original vendor, and became a lower-cost alternative to the output stacks sold by Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and HP.
What was at stake
Large organisations running Microsoft Dynamics, Dynamics AX, Navision or SAP produce a constant stream of business documents: invoices, orders, statements, contracts. The rules for how those look, where they go and how they are archived change all the time, and traditionally every change means an IT ticket or a paid call to a vendor.
The company, an ERP software vendor, was reselling a document-output engine in this space. That had two costs. Every sale shared revenue with the engine's maker, and customers kept asking for capabilities the maker would not build. The company decided to build its own.
Bringing the engine in-house
Roy joined as an outsourced developer to replace the engine at the core: the converter that turns raw ERP output into structured documents the rest of the platform can work with. The requirements were demanding from the start:
- Several input formats, including PDFs that first had to be read with OCR
- Enough throughput for enterprise volume, using every available CPU core
- A large set of business rules to turn messy, unstructured text into clean, structured data
The replacement was delivered in a few months and was good enough to sell. Because the engine was now the company's own, it no longer had to share revenue with the original vendor, so the project paid for itself and then some.
Handing control to the business user
Roy then joined the company permanently. Customers could already shape their output, but only through text-based configuration files that became impossible to keep an overview of once a process grew. That kept the platform in the hands of specialists rather than the business users who actually owned the documents.
Roy built a visual designer to close that gap. A user lays out the whole process on a canvas: pull in the ERP data, apply their own business rules, compose the layout, then route and archive the result, with no code and no configuration files. Changing an invoice layout or a distribution rule stopped being a ticket and became something the document's owner could do themselves.
What changed
The team grew to twelve engineers, with Roy as technical manager and product owner. Working closely with customers, partners and ERP consultants, the team shaped the platform into a cost-effective replacement for the document-output stacks sold by Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and HP: the same capability at a fraction of the cost, run by the people who use it every day.
Autarco Helios
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