2021 Enterprise Automation Award Nomination: Pulse Biosciences: Automate applications to streamline business processes
What were the underlying reasons or business implications for the need to automate business processes? Describe the business and technical challenges the company had. Provide Enhanced Customer Experience. Delight the Customer (Dermatologist) with fast Fulfillment of Digital Goods and Services (Cycle Units). Provide near real-time KPI’s and metrics to Physicians and our C-Suite executives. Set a foundation for building a predictive analytics model around Customer Behavior using Advanced Analytics. Automate Identification of Data anomalies within Enterprise Applications. Setting up foundation stone for an Improved Revenue Recognition. Minimize data entry and duplicate keystrokes in the ecosystem of transactional systems. Data governance. Describe your automation use case(s) and business process(es). Automated Association between Product once fulfilled and Customer. Automated replenishment of digital goods and services. Master Data governance. Synchronization of Customer and Address Data between our ERP and CRM applications. Perform ETL for Data warehousing application. 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. Leverage on built-in SNAPs for NetSuite and Salesforce. Took advantage of Triggered Pipelines. Setup proactive notifications within SnapLogic platform for any Execution failures and troubleshooting. Use metadata pipelines for monitoring traffic jams in pipeline execution. Leverage on Auto-upgrade capabilities and Management Dashboards provided by SnapLogic. Followed a disciplined IT Change Management procedure, including Regression Testing, User Acceptance and approvals as applicable. Maintain thorough documentation of enterprise architecture, functional requirements and field mappings. Closely managed cross-functional teams across Endpoint Applications, Business Stakeholders and Integration Developer. What were the business results after executing the strategy? Include any measurable metrics (ie. productivity improvement, speed improvement, % reduced manual inefficiencies, etc.) Initial focus was on Data Quality for six months to one year. After that it shifted to improving pipeline performance. Metadata pipeline in SnapLogic sends out alerts to Administrators for slow running pipelines Current focus is tightening security standards and scaling up for volume and velocity. Reports in NetSuite proactively send out alerts, where a functional component does not meet its SLA due to an Integration execution failure or delays. 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) FTE (~30%) Consultant Developer (~ 60%) Snaplogic Support via Zendesk (~ 10%) Anything else you would like to add? As the cloud focused architecture continues to grow in our go-to-market function, SnapLogic is the supporting pillar for much of the planned growth at Pulse Biosciences. With that, The SnapLogic footprint is expected to grow and assist with our enterprise automation.2021 Enterprise Automation Award Nomination: CBG: Delivering the pharmacy experience via data automation
What were the underlying reasons or business implications for the need to automate business processes? Describe the business and technical challenges the company had. Our primary reason and business need to automate data was to support data ingress/egress integrations for a new healthcare startup. Our startup vision is to: “build and support myriad healthcare entities through acclaimed clinical, operational and digital expertise and solutions to accelerate proven outcomes.” Our mission is: “to partner with forward-thinking entities who strive for excellence in delivering the pharmacy experience and provide a pathway to PBM ownership.” To do that, we had to go live with our startup on 5/1/2020. Our primary challenge was our timeline. We were not able to start working on data integration until 1/1/2020, so we only had 4 months to go-live. Our secondary challenges were numerous: Budget constraints required very lean technologist team Connect multiple cloud providers and SaaS tools PHI/PII requires absolute attention to security Everything must be CI/CD friendly Multiple service teams across multiple vendors to integrate 10+ vendors / partners with mission critical data 30+ inbound & outbound data interfaces Varying data formats, transport mechanisms, and schedules Configuration-driven automation Working through these challenges, we propelled our startup forward with automated business and systems processes across the enterprise. Describe your automation use case(s) and business process(es). Our automation use-cases, driven by key business processes, were that we needed to process multiple eligibility, claim, response, related pharmaceutical files daily and be able to scale to exponential volumes quickly in the future as new clients came on. Our business processes required integration of multiple service teams across multiple vendors to integrate, 10+ vendors / partners with mission critical data, 30+ inbound & outbound data interfaces, and we needed to be able to accept varying data formats, transport mechanisms, and schedules. 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. We didn’t have a lot of experience using SnapLogic, but we did understand data and how data integration works. To implement our solution against our very aggressive timeline, we learned SnapLogic, designed our data architecture, and gathered business requirements in parallel. We built a configuration-driven architecture to support our flexible approach to harnessing low-code/no-code delivery. We relied heavily on a parent-child pipeline relationship to minimize how many tasks needed to be scheduled through the SnapLogic interface. We built all our data integrations in AWS and SnapLogic and accomplished 95% of our goals using the core SnapPacks provided by SnapLogic. We also used the AWS SnapPacks to easily integrate with AWS S3, SQS, Aurora, and other services. Our implementation allowed us to carefully implement ETL/ELT capabilities and resulted in our entire solution being Infrastructure as Code. Our implementation resulted in fewer lines of code required to quickly deliver business requirements, ability to securely connect to anything, everything via simple API mechanisms, and we utilized NoOps for Cloudplex due to not having to manage any hardware or install software locally. The flexibility of our current solution allows for our future solutions to include: Advanced data features (AI, ML, big data), hyperautomation, and low/no-code citizen development. What were the business results after executing the strategy? Include any measurable metrics (ie. productivity improvement, speed improvement, % reduced manual inefficiencies, etc.) Our business results were vast. Most importantly, we were able to open our doors to our client as expected on 5/1/2020. In addition, we ended up with some stunning metrics that highlight the volume, resiliency, and flexibility of the data integrations we built: 90+ pipelines in production and 30+ integrations with partners & vendors 99% successful pipeline executions for ETL/ELT, APIs, and Bots More than 2 TB of data & ~575K objects have flowed through SnapLogic in production 99.99% CloudPlex platform uptime for core data pipelines & services 1000+ ETL, API, and Bot pipeline executions per day with ~3secs round trips All pipelines ready by 4/15/2020 with 2 weeks for additional testing Data & integration engineer cycle times are ~2days on average CBG is a testament to what a small but mighty team can do when they leverage the power of low-code and automation. 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) * We had four key people involved in the building out of our solution. Bethe Price (FTE) was our COO and primary business analyst for getting requirements refined. Davis Hansen (FTE) was our single data engineer for building and architecting the data integration solution. Roger Sramkoski (SnapLogic) was our key support contact from SnapLogic that helped us through our onboarding, training, and implementation of the SnapLogic platform & technologies. Last, our cloud architect helped us work through architecture complexities.2021 Enterprise Automation Award Nomination: Pitney Bowes: Building an Enterprise Data Warehouse and Data Lake
What were the underlying reasons or business implications for the need to automate business processes? Describe the business and technical challenges the company had. Following were some of the challenges that we had which implicated the need to automate our business process: a)Duplication and Redundancy in the process related to Development, Monitoring and Troubleshooting, b)Different Logic/Platform/Environment to gather the same set of data resulting in erroneous results, c)No common documentation of the process, d) no single Team/Owner of the process e)Delay in Time to completion Describe your automation use case(s) and business process(es). Pitney Bowes wanted to centrally get all of their enterprise data so that it will ensure that individual teams/users don’t need to get the data on their own, they don’t need to develop separate pipeline to get the data and the data is fully governed so that people have full trust on the data. For that PB decided to create an Enterprise Data Lake in Amazon S3. In order to achieve this Objective PB selected SnapLogic Integration Platform after reviewing at least 3 other ETL tools. Using SnapLogic PB was able to achieve it’s Data Lake Objective to centrally get all of their Enterprise Data within a period of 6 months from the time of getting the initially License of the Product. Following were some of the other use cases: a)Curating Data from S3 in the Enterprise Data warehouse - Snowflake b)Aggregating Data from Salesforce and SAP to create create a full order cycle process c)Gathering data from Third Party APIs related to social media events d)Creating various backup processes to have the data moved from Relation Databases into a less costly storage which is S3 thereby reducing cost and also maintain active data in Relational databases and Historical data into S3. 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. In order to achieve our Centralized Governed Data Lake Objective we used SnapLogic Automation Integration Platform to move data from various sources like, Salesforce, SAP_HANA, GUAM, OKTA, Oracle, SQL Server, Mongo, MySQL, REST API, SumoLogic, etc which made used of the Core Snaps like REST, JDBC and Specialized Data Snap like Salesforce, Oracle, SQL Server, SAP_HANA, Mongo DB, SumoLogic into our S3 (AWS S3 Data Lake) and then eventually move this data into the Enterprise Data warehouse Snowflake. What were the business results after executing the strategy? Include any measurable metrics (ie. productivity improvement, speed improvement, % reduced manual inefficiencies, etc.) Using SnapLogic the whole cycle from Development to Time to Completion improved by nearly 90%. The flexibility, speed and ease of use of the SnapLogic Platform allowed us to remove the time based bottleneck of getting the data into the hands of the Analyst and Data consumers resulting in increase in productivity by more than 70% Also process automation reduced the error percentage down to very negligible number 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) Myself along with 2 of my colleagues handled the initial Implementation who basically were responsible in developing and migrating the existing business process. There was assistance provided by SnapLogic Support team. We created various automated reusable templates which allowed teams even today to move their data from any source to any destination. We created configuration templates that these automated template pipeline uses to perform the Data movement. Error Trapping and automated Correction including Automated Retry were built into the templates. Today Pitney Bowes has nearly 250-300 users creating solution using the SnapLogic Platform. Anything else you would like to add? PB Investment in SnapLogic Integration Platform which is a true Enterprise Platform in the cloud has reaped tremendous benefits in speeding up their Business Objectives related to Data Movement and Data Availability resulting in increase growth and productivity.2021 Enterprise Automation Award Nomination: The Worcester Polytechnic Institute: Move to the Cloud
What were the underlying reasons or business implications for the need to automate business processes? Describe the business and technical challenges the company had. In 2016, Worcester Polytechnic Institute started their transition phase of moving their legacy ERP system, Banner to Workday. The need for the transition was primarily to increase efficiency for the departments, students, and faculty. Business Challenges: Departments like the Registrar, Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, Athletics, and the President’s Office were impacted by the slowness of obtaining information they needed for reports, analytics, and real-time covid information from the applications they interacted with, which negatively impacted the business and the student experience. The greatest impact to the University was obtaining student data and historical information for analytical analysis after from day to day operational Business. Technical Challenges: Because the departments were impacted by the slowness of data updates and integrations, the IT department determined that they needed a better solution to acquire student and HCM data for their systems to operate efficiently. The school needed a more robust solution that would improve business continuity. Legacy system provided limited capabilities and did not see feature updates that would address the Universities concerns. In addition, Banner had limited support to assist in providing a cross-functional exchange of information between Salesforce, Tableau, and Amazon Redshift that further limited them from delivering additional integrations to the departments. This prompted the team to identify Workday as their new student and HCM system, and a need for an integration platform. When considering an integration platform, the IT department needed a platform that was compatible with Workday; since it was going to be their single-source of truth. They needed an integration tool with capabilities that would help them in the future such as broad connectivity and compatibility with other applications and systems (including data-based connections), the ability to consume data while at REST, and the ease-of-use. At the beginning of the transition, there were hundreds of integrations that needed to be migrated from Banner to Workday, so having a product that was easy to use reduced development wait time and increased efficiency moving integration from build to production. Describe your automation use case(s) and business process (s). Since adopting SnapLogic, WPI has achieved many integration use cases: Move to the cloud: They did a phased approach where they first migrated HCM and Finance from Banner to Workday, and then continued to move Student to Workday. Analytics and Reporting: Bring data from various data sources (eProjects, Salesforce, Workday, etc.) into Amazon Redshift, their enterprise cloud data warehouse and build analytics and dashboards on Tableau. For example, They’d bring in data from their WPI eProjects so that the research department could view the trends and information on projects The Registrar would have access to analytics and reports around student applications, acceptance, and enrollment Create Covid-19 dashboards for the President, staff, faculty and student to stay up-to-date on Covid-19 cases, vaccination rates, # of people recovered from Covid-19, etc They’d also bring in data from different sources into Workday Prism, Workday’s analytics application, so that the Registrar can build their reports directly in Workday SnapLogic is also used to run process workflows for all departments like Finance, HR, University Advancement, Enrollment, Undergrad Enrollment, Library, Athletics, Police, Parking, Benefits, Payroll, Cherwell, and others. All the departments benefit from SnapLogic to have their operational processes run. 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. The IT team took a phased approach for their Banner-Workday transition project by first migrating their HCM and Finance over and then migrating Student as a second phase approach. Snaps used: Workday, Workday Prism Analytics, Tableau, SQLServer, Salesforce along with all other basic snaps like Joiner, Router, mapper etc What were the business results after executing the strategy? Include any measurable metrics (ie. productivity improvement, speed improvement, % reduced manual inefficiencies, etc.) The IT team is self-sufficient such that they don’t have to be dependent on 3rd party consultants to build/maintain integrations, or rely on point-to-point, out-of-the-box integrations. Everyone on the IT team can build and deliver integrations using SnapLogic. This provides redundancy and team collaboration, which helps create a simplified data architecture allowing the department to construct a data management strategy rather than focusing on short-term quick fixes (ie. OOTB integrations). Metrics include: The migration from Banner to Workday – Finance and HCM – took about 2 years and the team migrated over 10 years’ worth of data. The team is currently moving millions of data each day into Amazon Redshift for data analytics. Real-time data is updated into Workday and Tableau for reporting Over 250 integrations have been developed to run the campus’s processes 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) 5 developers use SnapLogic today to build and deliver integrations for the entire campus. Anything else you would like to add? The WPI IT team uses SnapLogic as their enterprise integration platform and will continue to build up the skills for SnapLogic so that integrations are scalable and don’t need to rely on consultants to manage integrations.
