Fast Turnaround PDF Invoice Production

On the face of it this was a straightforward requirement – take some data and produce some PDF documents – but as is often the case the reality is much more complex.

This process is just one part of an overall workflow that is used to produce the bills and as such ended up having tight time and production constraints. The process not only had the constraint of a tight turnaround time but also to produce documents that were as small as possible and so minimise transfer times between the production environment and the PlusNet deployment servers.

There were multiple templates depending on the account type and multiple page types depending on what was being reported. The system had to handle bills from 2 to 247 pages.

As the development process progressed it became apparent that the amount of time required for our section had to be reduced considerably – in fact from several hours to 30 minutes. This meant we had to analyse the flow through the application to find bottlenecks and identify areas where we could improve throughput. As we were processing tens of thousands of invoices a day, even saving a few milliseconds was significant.

As a result of using faster data reads, efficient PDF mapping, caching, multi threading, memory management and huge amounts of configuration testing, the final solution provided a response time well within that required.

Finally the process needed the documents to be approved before release. We used the Approval Pipeline API for this. Nominated bills were uploaded to the Romax Resource Centre and the decisions fed back to the application.

“I just want to thank Russell and his team for their patience, quick response and alertness during the recent transition from our legacy system to the new rendering system”
Steve Atkinson – Billing Lead, PlusNet