airsight – digitization of spending processes

Efficient expense management and processing of incoming invoices with Azure Logic Apps

airsight GmbH is a renowned and internationally active company in the aviation industry. It offers consulting, engineering, inspection and training services worldwide. Its customers include airports, air navigation service providers, civil aviation authorities, project developers, energy suppliers and other organizations.

airsight was faced with the challenge of providing its employees and administration with an efficient and secure expense management system for processing incoming invoices. With employees spread across the globe and a high demand for secure and powerful IT solutions, airsight was looking for a flexible and scalable solution to effectively support its employees and customers.

We were able to support airsight in its search for a suitable cloud solution and together we introduced an interface between the existing ERP system “CAS genesisWorld” and the newly introduced spend management platform “Payhawk”. Azure Logic Apps impressed with their scalability and integration options, which is why they were the interface of choice.

Starting point digitization of spending processes

In order to meet the requirements of the globally active airsight team, a number of challenges arose in the area of expense management and incoming invoice processing. Previously, expenses were posted manually to the corresponding projects in the ERP system (CAS genesisWorld), which was a time-consuming process. In addition, incoming invoices were also checked manually, which led to a media break. In order to make these processes more efficient and to offer airsight employees a smooth workflow, a solution was sought that would automate these tasks and simplify and optimize the workflow.

To this end, airsight has decided to introduce the “Payhawk” spend management platform. In future, the project data was to be automatically transferred from genesisWorld to Payhawk and the transactions from Payhawk were to be transferred back to the ERP as expenses and thus booked to the projects.

Challenges

The challenge was that the “CAS genesisWorld” and “Payhawk” systems use different data formats. In addition, only certain expenses are to be transferred to the ERP.

Furthermore, “CAS genesisWorld” is hosted on an Azure virtual machine in a separate network, so that direct access from the internet is not possible. “CAS GenesisWorld” is also not available 24/7, so that a buffer option had to be created.

Solution

In order for the data to be exchanged and processed between the systems, it must be transformed in real time during transmission.

To ensure ad hoc transfer and transformation, Logic Apps were introduced as an interface between “Payhawk” and “Genesis”.

Since the Genesis system is not available 24/7, a storage queue has been introduced to back up all newly created documents from Genesis.

The actual transfer process is started by a so-called queue trigger. For this purpose, various metadata from “Genesis” and “Payhawk” are loaded and synchronized with each other.

In addition, the data is transformed into the Genesis format. The transformation is carried out using Liquid templates (Liquid Template Language), which can be used in a wide range of ways for data transformations. A template is generated from the target format and the attributes of the source file are mapped to the target format. Field-based validations/conditions, etc. can even be applied for this purpose. If an error occurs, the data set remains in the storage queue and can be processed again later.

By using Azure Logic Apps in conjunction with Liquid Templates, a robust interface between the two systems could be built very quickly. This can also be easily monitored out-of-the-box using the Azure Monitor.