REGION: Germany
INDUSTRY: Services
SOLUTION: Workload Automation
Automic Automates and
Schedules entire Dataworkflow Process for
Deutsche Post.com
• 50% reduction in set up cost for new customers
• 40% r ed u c t i on i n p r od u c t i on ex ec u ti o n t i m e
• I nc r ea sed p r od u c t i v i t y
The Company
Deutsche Post.com is a subsidiary of Deutsche Post
AG, located in Bonn, employing around 50 specialists
for electronic mail services. It specializes in outsourcing communication services for two key industries,
energy suppliers and telecommunication providers.
Both services are being offered to major German
enterprises in these business sectors in order to save
costs in their business processes and reduce the
required in-house resources for regular communication activities.
The Challenge
For some four years, Deutsche Post.com have used a
mixture of an EDI product, with schedulers and workflow tools to deliver an automated meter reading
and invoicing solution to their customers. With
several heterogeneous steps and a large number of
customers to service, the original solution lacked the
intelligence, robustness and scalability required to
monitor, improve and expand the service. Deutsche
Post.com moved to an Oracle Database in order to
improve the capacity and robustness of the infrastructure, but, as the number of customers grew
the complexity and variety of the solution stretched
the capabilities of the existing tools and introduced
heavy administrative workloads to manage the
various tools and processes.
It was then that they decided to evaluate a more
sophisticated automation and monitoring solutions.
“We needed a product that could manage the scheduling and processing of the complete data- workflow
solution”, said Eddy van der Zee, Project Manager,
Deutsche Post.com.
The requirement to run and monitor a long running
business process (i.e. a process that may last for
a number of hours, days or weeks) meant that no
ordinary time and based scheduler would be sufficient. The selected product should be able to react
to events, such as a certain file arriving or a certain
amount of records being processed, in order to
maximize the efficiency of the process in a 24x7
operation.
“With the Automic platform we found a product which
combines intelligent multi-platform scheduling, integrated
communications with remote systems and easy to use
monitoring facilities.
Eddy van der Zee,
Project Manager at Deutsche Post.com
The Solution
“With the Automic platform we found a product
which combines intelligent multi-platform scheduling, integrated communications with remote systems
and easy to use monitoring facilities”, said van der
Zee. The Automic platform is an event based automation solution. It enables 24x7 automated operations
through reacting to business, application and data
events as opposed to the traditional tools that are
restricted by date and time.
For Deutsche Post.com, the Automic platform now
automates and schedules the entire data-workflow
process that obtains data from customers in order
to print meter reading cards which are then posted
to the end user. Once the card is returned and
scanned (or completed on the internet) the Automic platform automates the process to update the
database, returning the enriched information to the
utility company and (optionally) ultimately ending in
the printing and posting of invoices on behalf of the
client.
Not only was Deutsche Post.com able to meet
their scalability demands by choosing the Automic
platform, it also meant that they could rationalize
their architecture. The solution is 100 percent Java
based on a Sun Solaris platform and integrating with
BEA Weblogic. All communications are HTTP or FTP.
The Automic platform performs scheduling and the
necessary process integration to automate as much
of the process as possible.
Furthermore, the Automic architecture simplified the
whole process, enabling Deutsche Post.com to cut
down the set up cost for new customers by at least
50 percent as well as reducing production execution
time by between 25 and 40 percent. “We all think that
the Automic platform increases our productivity,”
said van der Zee.
Once the development team were up to speed with
the Automic environment, it was easy for them to
build new modules and chains and, in the event of
any errors, the output was immediately accessible
through the Automic client – it was then very easy to
make changes and re-run the process.
“We all think that the
Automic platform
increases our
productivity,”
Eddy van der Zee,
Project Manager at Deutsche Post.com
Automic is the world’s most comprehensive platform in
automating businesses. Founded 1985, Automic pioneered
the largest, independent, globally deployed automation
platform which powers the enterprise, application and
infrastructure. Now, as the consumerization of IT accelerates,
Automic is reimagining how organizations integrate next
generation service models such as cloud, DevOps and big
data. We challenge conventional thinking, enabling our
customers to be faster, smarter, in control. Automic – the
standard in business automation.
www.automic.com