First place - ISP Procurement by ISProjects
What makes this ISP Procurement system remarkable is its ability to fully automate the processing of incoming PO (Purchase Order) and non-PO invoices. Accounts Payable employees, in medium sized and large organizations, process tens of thousands of invoices manually every year. The large number of invoices in combination with the manual work involved (booking in the financial system, checking accuracy, routing for approval and archiving), means processing the purchase invoices takes up a lot of personnel capacity of the Accounts Payable department.

This system matches PO invoices against goods receipts. Incoming invoices are scanned daily and saved in TIFF format. At this point, the invoice can't be altered anymore and the data integrity is secured. The index fields, such as invoice number, order number, supplier and amount, are then automatically recognized using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition). The recognized data are verified and released to ISP Invoice.

The ISP Procurement system can work within an existing SAP R/3 environment on a completely integrated basis. By integrating and automating this process, processing time can be decreased by as much as 70%.

"The degree of integration with many other systems is VERY impressive. Leverages several technologies -- including Lotus Workflow. Quick ROI" - Joe Litton

"There was a lot of integration between Notes and other systems. I liked the Kofax integration for scanning, and the Web and Notes interfaces were nice. I managed a project a few years ago where we implemented a document management system very similar to that (not Notes based), and I appreciate how complicated the whole business can be. I thought they did a nice job with it." -- Julian Robichaux

"Comprehensive invoice tracking system, lots of configuration and workflow. Very slick invoice handling. Big system. Tooling in place to measure performance." -- Bill Buchan

In the end, determining the winners was extremely difficult, but ISP Procurement really stood out in a few key ways. First, it automated something that is actually quite difficult to automate. The second big reason for its win was that not only was the app itself very well done, but it has a number of additional features that make it easy to support in terms of performance measurement and localization. And finally was the number of third party ERP applications they can integrate with including SAP, Baan, and JD Edwards.

Wrap-up
Now that the contest is over, everyone is extremely happy the way it turned out. We received many more submissions than we'd hoped for, and the quality of every single one of them blew us away. I think that I can speak for all the judges in saying that it was much more difficult to judge than we had expected.

I think this shows that even someone who has been working with Notes for ten years can be surprised at how powerful a development environment Notes is. Thanks to everyone who participated in this contest and made it such a huge success!

Also a big "congratulations" to our winners who very adeptly demonstrated exactly what we wanted them to -- that Lotus Notes and Domino is not only great at mail, but also an exceptionally capable application development platform!

Craig Schumann is a contest judge who racked his brain trying to choose contest winners. He's also Teamstudio's Senior VP of Development.