2021 Enterprise Automation Award Nomination: Drax Group: Modernize to build Drax's Target Architecture

[dmiller]

What were the underlying reasons or business implications for the need to automate business processes? Describe the business and technical challenges the company had.

Drax outgrew the dozens of heritage systems that were set up decades ago. Instead of dedicating their time to support business goals, the IT team spent an excruciating amount of time and costly resources to maintain these systems. In addition, the legacy IT environment was complex with many disparate data sources that disabled the business from extracting and analyzing the data to make timely business decisions.

The IT team needed to replace their existing integration tool in order to eliminate the manual labor of building and maintaining integrations, and the tool also needed to support the company’s long-term strategy.

Describe your automation use case(s) and business process(es).

There are 3 use cases:

1. Automate end-to-end customer experience by providing clients with greater visibility into the energy consumption of their electric vehicles. By monitoring the energy consumption on the customer portal and mobile app, clients are better able to manage their EV usage, energy consumption, and energy efficiency.
2. Have complete visibility into the end-to-end Biomass transportation journey that travels from North America to the UK so that they have better insights for the supply chain digital twin. A machine learning layer is put on top of the data to fine tune the insights for better KPI management.
3. Automate the Procure 2 Pay process, digitizing the entire process while gaining better supplier insights.

Describe how you implemented your automations and processes. Include details such as what SnapLogic features and Snaps were used to build out the automations and processes.

Snaps used are: Azure Active Directory, MS Sharepoint, REST, ServiceNow, SOAP

What were the business results after executing the strategy? Include any measurable metrics (ie. productivity improvement, speed improvement, % reduced manual inefficiencies, etc.)

With SnapLogic, the IT team is able to create the Drax Target Architecture that includes 3 interlinked hubs: the Integration Hub, the API Hub and the Data Hub. SnapLogic serves as the Integration Hub that helps connect dozens of on-premises and cloud applications while enabling the team to connect to APIs and data as well.

Who was and how were they involved in building out the solution? (Please include the # of FTEs, any partners or SnapLogic professional services who were involved on the implementation)

Drax employees and SnapLogic PS were involved during the implementation. Since the initial go-live, Drax employees have been doing their own integrations.