Global Telecommunications Company Automates Delivery and Tracking of Oracle Generated Documents

The Company

Headquartered in Redwood City, California, Equinix is a multinational company that specializes in connected data centers and related services. With data centers located in 52 markets across five continents, they are the world’s largest interconnection and colocation provider.

The Problem

Equinix had a manual process of sending documents such as invoices and purchase orders to their customers and vendors. This process was prone to human error and required individuals to track sent documents manually. With the company growing fivefold in the last ten years, the number of sent documents has also increased. “As our company is growing, we have more customers and more vendors. We need to communicate with them as fast as possible – time is of the essence,” says Mohan Dutt, Senior Director of IT at Finance Shared Services. He reports that Equinix was manually delivering 10,000 to 15,000 documents and spending 400 to 500 hours monthly on the delivery and follow-up process. The company considered increasing headcount to meet the volume but doing so wouldn’t scale as the business continues to grow. Dutt understood this was a considerable challenge for the company and realized it was time for a solution to automate the document delivery process to keep pace with the business growth.

The Solution

After several years of evaluating various options, Equinix couldn’t find a solution as robust as AventX for Oracle Connector. Dutt states, “The closest one we evaluated was Oracle BI Publisher, but then we had to build additional extensions. With AventX, it all comes together in one box.”

AventX allows Equinix to automatically deliver any volume of Oracle-generated documents while providing flexibility and control. For example, their Brazil branch required each customer’s invoices to include specific attachments. The original delivery process was only able to send one document per email. AventX allows emails to include multiple attachments, saving users’ time and customers from a cluttered inbox. Today, Equinix has a logic to automate document pick-up and delivery through AventX, which is configured to send out documents over five to six hours. There are also reports to monitor which documents were sent and bounced back.

With the implementation of AventX, business users are no longer doing any manual processing, and customers are happy they get their invoices within hours. “The faster these documents reach our customers, the faster we get paid—which is an improvement in our Days Sales Outstanding.” Equinix can also scale up, sending six to seven times more documents than their original delivery process without adding headcount on their business or IT departments. Dutt adds, “AventX has helped us to automate our process and lead us to a very efficient end-to-end process for document delivery.”