The Curry Oil Company is a large oil jobber based in Kentucky. They have 15 convenience stores through various towns and cities within the State. These stores were computerised, and connected to a central server in head office via a dial-up connection, to upload pricing details and download sales information on a daily basis.

The program used for this task was not very reliable, and required considerable staff resources back in head office to ensure the success of each transmission. The costs associated with providing a more secure connection could not be justified, and the IT staff were delegated the task of sourcing or developing a communication product utilising the Internet as all the store’s computer’s had access to the Internet.

MailRules has solved this problem admirably. Each store has a copy of MailRules, as does the head office server.

When a business process has some output for any, or all, of the store’s. This output is automatically placed in a “folder”, on the server’s desktop. MailRules searches for any files within this folder on a regular basis. If any files or documents are in the folder, MailRules knows to send the data to the store(s) automatically over the Internet direct to the email address of the particular computer (an Outbound Rule).

Once received at the store, MailRules knows that the email and attached files are for it to process according to an Inbound business rule defined within itself. Usually the pricing matrix contained within the application on these computers is updated on a regular basis.

Every night the computer in the store runs a program under the control of MailRules to extract the days work files, MailRules grabs the output file and automatically attaches it to an email for the server at head office. MailRules dials the Internet, sends the email and attachment, then disconnects from the Internet. The work files for each store are received by MailRules at the server, a business process is run to aggregate the data, and is passed to the appropriate desktop of a staff member at head office for analysis the next morning.

MailRules has eliminated many of the tedious, time consuming tasks associated with the original process. It has also provided a log and transaction trail of the processes used, and achieved all this within shorter time scales than the original tasks.

“Other MailRules procedures are now being tested to achieve even greater benefits and cost savings. It is envisaged that MailRules will be used within Curry Oil Company to link the legacy applications with office automation, customer management, and supply chain applications to provide staff and customers with more functionality and service,” said Dave Dougherty, IT Manager, “I have been searching for just such a product as MailRules for years, this is fantastic, it’s simple, it’s works, it’s secure and we can automate our processes.”