Hampshire Trust Bank: Building a More Agile Financial Services Organization
2022 Business Impact Award Nomination Submitted by ⋮IWConnect on behalf of Hampshire Trust Bank. What were the underlying reasons or business implications for the need to automate business processes? As a UK-based specialist bank focused on providing asset finance, specialist mortgages, and development finance solutions, Hampshire Trust Bank (HTB) is continuously innovating and implementing sophisticated solutions to optimize internal business processes. These processes range from Business Intelligence (BI) and reporting to screening and payments integrations. HTB has a clear strategy of acquiring best-of-breed applications to maximize business efficiency and value with new systems that share data and processes within the existing software ecosystem. Each system has its own technology stack on one side and data formats on the other. As a result of this difference, data interoperability became one of the main challenges affecting HTB operational efficiency. Furthermore, considering that data contains personally identifiable information, it required cryptography solutions such as X509 and PGP to be implemented. Once data has been consolidated, screening and monitoring processes are orchestrated to ensure data validity. Paramount among HTB’s concerns were to: support the increased processing of payment transactions per month improve the process of data screening to ensure data validity become more agile and increase customer satisfaction With process resilience of critical importance for any financial services organization, SnapLogic was used to move workload between data centers or strategically use the cloud depending on availability and requirements. Describe your automation use case(s) and business process(es). Use Cases Integration of payments, general ledger, direct debit, and direct credit transactions from asset finance software Alfa to internal and external payment systems Integration of more than 100 reports from Alfa into HTB’s data warehouse Integration of Finova Core Banking Platform’s processes for retail savings customers Risk and fraud detection with implementation of transactions screening with Comply Advantage Business Processes Fully automated processes for customer and employee screening Payments integration with Bottomline and other external providers Consolidation of data into a unified Snowflake Data warehouse for advanced BI analysis and reporting Describe how you implemented your automations and processes. Planning, defining and documenting The process starts by defining the business flow, requirements, and edge cases. Once these things have been defined, the design is documented in detail. A team of business users and technical experts reviews the documentation and approves the design. Implementation The implementation of automation starts by creating pipelines and other assets such as parameterizations or storage locations. Pipelines are executed as Scheduled, Triggered and Ultra tasks. JMS consumers in asynchronous mode are used to read messages from message queues. REST Snaps are used to read data and execute processes for REST endpoints. PGP Snaps are used for cryptography operations, and Script Snap is used for custom cryptographic operations. Data is transformed with a combination of mapper snaps. Results are written into various destination file systems by using File Writer Snaps. Log messages are produced and transferred to Splunk. JIRA tickets are automatically created by using JIRA Create Snap in the case of exceptions. Additionally, email messages and xMatters alerts are sent to the users. Expression libraries are used extensively to parametrize configurations across multiple staging environments. Once the development is complete, the detailed quality assurance process on multiple environments starts before the solution is finally deployed in the production environment. What were the business results after executing the strategy? Integrations combined with specialized banking systems allow the processes to complete faster, more efficiently and with fewer errors across all those systems, dramatically optimizing business processes. Currently, there are more than 50 different systems and apps automated and interoperable in production. By using SnapLogic automations, HTB can support the increased demand and process tens of thousands of payment transactions per month, as well as thousands of screening operations each month. There are tens of thousands of pipeline executions that result in millions of documents every day. Automation plays a key role in both digital transformation and developing a more agile business. Team members can now focus on higher-priority tasks such as strategy, security and customer relationship management. Who was and how were they involved in building out the solution? The solutions were built by a team composed of internal domain experts, consultants from the external systems, architects, integrators and Quality Assurance professionals. Five FTEs were engaged in the projects. In a relationship that lasts three years, ⋮IWConnect acts as the integration implementation partner and assists in the implementation of multiple projects, each lasting from three to 12 months.Skidmore College: Rebuilding Identity Management System with Oracle HCM Cloud
2022 Business Impact Award Nomination Describe your business and technical use case(s) and the challenges the business had. Skidmore was migrating from Oracle Ebiz on-premise to Oracle HCM cloud at the same time changing our Identity Mgmt system to Okta. All of this occurirng during the pandemic, with staff fully remote and in some cases furloughed. We needed to rebuild our entire Identity Mgmt system from the ground up with the new Oracle HCM system and Okta. Snaplogic became the integration hub for all of this work. In less than a year, we rebuilt our IDM system to work with the new Oracle HCM, Ellucian Banner, Okta and Active Directory. Allowing both employees and students to on board quickly access to all of the applications they needed across the organization Describe your strategy and execution to solve the business challenge. We created a database middle layer to store all the IDM information required for all users and built out pipelines within Snaplogic to handle near real time processing of user on and off boarding across the organization. Who was and how were they involved in building out the solution? We had 5-6 staff members working on this solution from start to finish. What were the business results after executing the strategy? Skidmore was able to remove the reliance on a 3rd party black box IDM platform and bring it in house. We also rolled out new features to allow users to pick from a list of potential usernames/emails including the use of “preferred first initial”. What was the ROI you gained from executing the strategy? Full transparency into user provisioning. Cut 3rd party IDM system which was about 50k per year Skidmore_Snaplogic.pptx (1.0 MB)Abano Healthcare New Zealand: Impressive Cost Savings by Streamlining IT Modernisation
2022 Business Impact Award Nomination Describe your business and technical use case(s) and the challenges the business had. Abano have an aggressive roadmap to acquire new businesses. Business direction mandated a minimal in house IT capability. Needed to augment the operating model through automation and governance. Pressure to optimise cost model and operating margins through standardisation and automation of business processes. Describe your strategy and execution to solve the business challenge. Abano Healthcare was also drawn to the agnostic nature of the SnapLogic platform. The DSO has a mixture of on-prem and other pieces coming in. SnapLogic was flexible and, therefore, able to connect to everything. With ambitious growth aspirations, it was clear Abano Healthcare needed a local, easy-to-use, scalable iPaaS solution that would spark communication between its disjointed systems to power its modernization journey. Who was and how were they involved in building out the solution? SnapLogic PS What were the business results after executing the strategy? $250K costs savings in solution implementation. 2 months time to value. 50% reduction in operating expenditure estimated for an integration platform. 200% reduction in FTE requirements across IT. What was the ROI you gained from executing the strategy? $250K costs savings in solution implementation. 2 months time to value. 50% reduction in operating expenditure estimated for an integration platform. 200% reduction in FTE requirements across IT. Anything else you would like to add? Nisha Clark is an advocate and has recently represented SnapLogic at Marketing events and feature in a customer focused video. Abano Healthcare Streamlines and Scales in Innovative Ways With the Power of SnapLogic | SnapLogic2021 Business Impact Award Nomination Denny's: Partnering with delivery apps, such as UberEats, DoorDash
Describe your business and technical use case(s) and the challenges the business had: The business use case is: Partnering with delivery apps, such as UberEats, DoorDash and others, makes up about 30% of Denny’s business since Covid-19 pandemic hit. In order to understand and improve the business outcomes of these partnerships, the Marketing team needs access to the data from delivery apps portals. In gaining access to the data in a timely manner, the Marketing team can analyze and identify areas for improvement, including: customer satisfaction (star system, positive/negative feedback) missing orders Sales performance per brand (Denny’s, Burger Den, Melt Down) Staff training at each point-of-sales (POS) - gaps in the process per POS The business challenge: The Marketing team needed a more automated process of getting all their app delivery data, so they can speed up their analysis and reporting. The Marketing team would previously log into each individual delivery app portal (UberEats, Doordash) with four different logins to download CSV files for all four of their restaurant brands. They’d download each CSV file, merge and clean the data before they can do the actual analysis and reporting. This process would take them 3-4 days to obtain. Technical Challenge: Needed to eliminate the manual pull of data from each of these app delivery platforms and get all the app delivery data into a data warehouse (Microsoft Azure and SQL Database) so that the Marketing team can have the data readily available in Tableau Dashboards, so they can analyze and report on trends. Describe your strategy and execution to solve the business challenge. Include details on how SnapLogic played a role in the strategy and execution, including Snaps and other SnapLogic products/features: The Denny’s team spent ~5 days building out the integration. The bulk of the time spent was figuring out how to make the Oath2 accounts to create tokens and Webhooks work. Once they figured out how, the integration building was simple and quick. They used Oath2 account to create tokens so that the Snaplogic pipeline can use the token to access the reports from the delivery providers (UberEats for e.g.). Once the REST API is called with the token, UberEats queues the requests and user a Webhook to send back the report when ready. The webhook is a triggered pipeline in Snaplogic that’s used as a REST API to be called. Snaps used: JSON Parser to see what kind of file it is, Route Snap and Mapper to check which date gets mapped, and Azure Bulk Load to move the data to different tables within Azure. Who was and how were they involved in building out the solution? (Please include the # FTEs, any partners or SnapLogic professional services who were involved on the implementation) 2 Developers What were the business results after executing the strategy? The Marketing team can get fresh and up-to-date data every day and can also view all historical data from 2020, when they have partnered with these app delivery partners. The team can filter and create presentations using Tableau Dashboards build on top of this data. What was the ROI you gained from executing the strategy? Include any additional, measurable metrics (i.e. productivity improvement, speed improvement, %reduced manual inefficiencies, etc.) The marketing team has eliminated the time needed to login, download, merge, and clean data that usually takes 3-4 days before they can start analyzing the data. Instead, they can access the data directly from Tableau. Anything else you would like to add? There are two more use cases: Email Bot to automate the process of moving data from individual email to a dashboard on Tableau. One of their distributors sends an email to the Procurement lead at Denny’s with a file (Excel file) that shows all of the out-of-stock inventory items (condiments, raw supplies) every morning. Previously, the Procurement lead would manually download the file, review the out-of-stock items, and share with distribution centers a subset list of out-of-stock items that would impact each distribution center To eliminate the manual work each morning, an integration pipeline is created to automate the process. The major distributor would send the email to an email distribution list, then the pipeline would be triggered to look for the subject line using the Mail Reader Snap. Then the pipeline would read the attached Excel file, manipulate the data as needed, and then add the data to the SQL Server, and then the report would be created in Tableau so that the distribution centers can have access to their specific out-of-stock reports. Email Bot to send Workday reports via email. The Audit team would download reports from Workday for auditing purposes, which took time to create the reports each time. Instead, an integration pipeline is created so that whenever a person needs a specific report, they’d send an email with an email title asking for a specific report. This would trigger the pipeline to call Workday and send back the report requested to the person. Essentially, an Email Bot can be created/recreated for users to retrieve reports, eliminating the need to manually download from each platform.
