Tying Automation to the Line of Business
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The document discusses several use cases for automating business processes using the Automic Automation Platform. It describes automating social media for event marketing, commercial finance processes, customer onboarding for mobile operators, outage response and customer communication, employee access control, disaster recovery testing, and supply chain replenishment. Central benefits highlighted include reduced costs, improved customer experience, increased visibility and control.
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Tying Automation to the Line of Business
- 1. Tying Automation to Your Lines of Business November 2015 Craig Kirkeide
- 2. 2 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved Agenda + How Can you Achieve This – The Automation Platform + Use Case 1: Social Media Automation Drives Revenues + Use Case 2: Automating Commercial Finance Process + Use Case 3: Automate the Green Screen + Use Case 4: Outage Alerting and Customer Communication + Use Case 5: Intelligent Employee Access Control System + Use Case 6: Disaster Recovery Planning + Use Case 7: Advantages of a centralized automation solution
- 3. 3 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved Most Processes can Benefit from Automation
- 4. 4 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved Automation Engine The Automic Automation Platform Templates Blueprints Action Packs Domain-specific, re-usable workflows Platform-independent Open Scripting Native and open scripting environment PackageManager Centrally store & version solution components ECC Plug-ins Customizable GUI API/ Web Service SDK Industry’s most comprehensive development kit OOTB Agents Custom Agents Stateful integrations with 3rd party Apps Adapters Stateless connection with 3rd party technologies 4
- 5. 5 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved The Enterprise Control Center – Quick and Easy Self Service 5 • Quickly Enable Business Users • Easy to setup and Secure • No Advanced Training Required
- 6. 6 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved • Project to drive-up attendance through social media contact when ticket sales were below target • Campaigning on – Twitter – Facebook – SMS (Registered Users) – E-Mail (Registered Users) Use Case 1: Social Media Automation Drives Revenues
- 7. 7 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved Acquiring the Data Right Time, Theater Operational Health, Automating the Social Media Feeds
- 8. 8 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved Taking Action on the Data 8
- 9. 9 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved Example Outcome of the Campaign
- 10. 10 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved Use Case 2: Automating Commercial Finance Process • Collect information from internal and external parties • Adding the collected information to the decision process • Streamline and automate decision process
- 11. 11 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved Collecting Information Process FTP Monitoring FTP Server Monitoring Email Inbox Read EMail Extract Attachm. Copy File Create Backup Dir Move to Backup Copy File Automic Noti- fication Consol- idation
- 12. 12 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved © Automic. All rights reserved. • People often think that to automate with the platform it must be batch! • Business processes may span manual activity of users that can be automated • Business processes will need to keep the user as part of the process – just remove the pain Use Case 3: Automate the Green Screen
- 13. 13 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved New Mobile Operator Customer Onboarding Several days to onboard a customer end-to-end Over 60 staff members involved to perform manual tasks Customer signs contract with mobile operator 1 Customer information is collected in an xls file 2 • Profile / address check (incl. De-duplication) • Credit history check • SIM card registration • Rate plan assignment • Mobile number porting (if applicable) • Hardware order placement (if applicable) Routine processes are performed semi-automatically (e.g. rate plan assignment) 4 Other OSS / BSS systems People or siloed tools transfer the data into various systems 3 ERP/CRM system (e.g. Siebel) Billing/ Invoicing system (e.g. …) Porting & Subscriber Services system (e.g. …) Customer is able to activate his/her phone 5 Arrrrgh - this took forever!!
- 14. 14 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved • Profile / address check (incl. De-duplication) • Credit history check • SIM card registration • Rate plan assignment • Mobile number porting (if applicable) • Hardware order placement (if applicable) Routine processes are performed semi-automatically (e.g. rate plan assignment) 4 Service delivery time reduced by more than 95% Substantial end-to-end efficiency increase (50 fewer staff needed) New Mobile Operator Customer Onboarding ✓ ✓ Customer signs contract with mobile operator 1 Customer information is collected in an xls file 2 Other OSS / BSS systems People or siloed tools transfer the data into various systems 3 ERP/CRM system (e.g. Siebel) Billing/ Invoicing system (e.g. …) Porting & Subscriber Services system (e.g. …) Customer is able to activate his/her phone 5 Wow, that was fast!
- 15. 15 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved 30% fewer Customer operation back office staff 3.5 min Reduced service delivery time from 2 hours to 50 fewer Staff involved in executing one of the customer facing process Automating this Process Meant
- 16. 16 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved • Major storm causes a complete overload of customer call center • Project created to engage customers, improve customer experience and reducing impact to call center Use Case 4: Outage Alerting and Customer Communication
- 17. 17 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved Mobile Alerting Platform Event Processing & Automation Subscription & Reporting Communications Customers • Real-time Data Stream Mgmt. • Error, Pattern Detection & Decision Making • Trigger Communication • Transparency & Compliance • Root Cause Analysis • Customer Self Service • Subscription Management • Customer Feedback • Cross-Media Altering & Communication • Emergency Communication • Spam Management Data Sources • Billing • Outage • Smart and Legacy Metering System • Credit and Usage Threshold • ... Mobile Alerts Project – Solution Overview
- 18. 18 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved Automic Integrates and Controls the Process End-to-End Trigger Outage Alert Select / Prep Customer- list Send Outage Alerts Update ServiceNow Billing DWH/BI SAG EMB … Collect & Report Customer Feedback Execute Remediation Update Customer- Care Process Automic‘s Automation and Integration Gateway Provides Full End-to-End Control & Service Level Assurance
- 19. 19 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved Customer Outcome 30% Reduction of normal level in- bound calls and reactive customer care activities Dramatic increase in customer satisfactio n Importantly – they are ready for the next major storm or other disaster
- 20. 20 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved • Employee Access Control System is responsible for – Permit or reject access to buildings or devices – Work time posting – and many other workforce related tasks Use Case 5: Intelligent Employee Access Control System The combination of Siemens MyTAM and Automic extend the capabilities heavily
- 21. 21 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved • Reminds managers and employees when a training or certification needs to be renewed. – Reject the access if the certification has expired • Examples – The Forklift allows only certified forklift drivers to use the fork lift – Only certified employees are permitted to work with the X-Ray devices Example for a intelligent access control system
- 22. 22 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved • The employee protection board specifies a minimum number of first aider per building – The access control system informs the responsible person if these number fall below the minimum. Example for a intelligent access control system
- 23. 23 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved • Have to prove IT DR Continuity has been planned for • Need to test it regularly • Need to know it will work • Need it to run efficiently if required Use Case 5: Disaster Recovery Planning
- 24. 24 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved Primary Site Failover SitePeople Process Tools Storage Admin Runbooks Process Manuals Scripts Post-it Notes Storage Management & Deployment Network Management Tools Server Configuration & ManagementNetwork Switches Load Balancers Routers Firewalls Application Web Server App Server Mail Server Storage IP SAN Diskless Storage N/w Attached Storage Database Database Server IP SAN Diskless Storage N/w Attached Storage Switches Load Balancers Routers Firewalls Web Server App Server Mail Server Database Server Security Team DBA App Admin Windows Admin Unix Admin Network Engineers Handoffs and coordination between cross-IT domains & silos Disparate & disconnected management tools Challenges with Disaster Recovery Today Maintenance of failover site
- 25. 25 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved Customer’s Management Dashboard List of Services RTO RPO Last drill performed DR Readiness: Server availability, synchronization
- 26. 26 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved Provides metrics to evaluate the SLA Quality of Service and Capacity Planning DRP Analytics & Reports
- 27. 27 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved • The replenishment process includes dozens of shops with a total revenue of 12 Billion Euro • Old process consist of 30 distributed schedule solutions – Every Workflows update required process delay • Missing centralized process monitoring – Delay in recognizing of errors Use Case 6: Advantages of a centralized automation solution
- 28. 28 Property of Automic Software. All rights reserved • All steps of the replenishment process were implemented in Automic – Mix of SAP based and non SAP based solutions – Connecting directly to the Warehouse System – Integrating the Point of Sales (POS) systems • Extensive Dashboard with the most important KPIs Redesign of the Replenishment Process
Editor's Notes
- I have noticed that customers put in our solution to fix a problem, it might be scheduling, SAP System Copy, Application Release automation or any of the other reasons but then typically they don’t expand its use. They will do more of the problem they fixed, more scheduling, more release, more everything else. But rarely do they look at how else can this technology help the rest of the business. Hopever, We have started noticing a new job being created but some companies – the Automation Architect. This role is held in traditional IT but is focused across the business – there remit – where can this technology assist the business, both inside IT and across the business functions – that is an interesting advancement and the benefits they are starting to realise are impressive. I intend to give a taster of the types of areas where these companies have expanded – some are named, but you know (because your customers) some like to remain very modest about their achievements – so I have left them private. In most instances the results are what the customer did themselves – not engaging professional services from us – some we helped with and one we did ourselves. So, before we start on those cases, I just want to spend a couple of minutes to review the ONE Automation platform and specifically where we talk about it playing.
- With these distinctions and our approach to simplifying the complexity inherent in the modern enterprise One Automation can address the diverse business and IT needs of end-users. Our platform gives users the ability to focus on solving the problem rather than having to write scripts and code that requires them to become a subject matter experts across multiple technologies. One Automation eliminates the complexity by giving end-users in operations, development and business roles what they need to solve problems at their level of knowledge. Here are the components of our solution that make this possible: Automic’s One Automation Engine is at the heart of our stack. It provides mission-critical workflow execution, monitoring, and complex dependency processing functionality (among other things). It is scalable to any Enterprise environment, so it can meet your current or future processing requirement without significant system alterations. It has a clustered architecture so processing will not be stopped if machines fail or are taken off-line. API: Industries most comprehensive development kit – The same API we use for our front-end client is fully available to developers for UI customization, direct application-to-automation integration, and to feed dashboard and reporting information. ECC – Customizable UI: Our web-based UI is role-driven so the end users experience can be customized to their role. As Automic and our community add functionality UI elements can be hot-plugged into a runing system for uninterruped service while you add new solutions to the platform. Adapters – Stateless integration to technologies like Web Services and JMS. These technologies can be called from Jobs or used as the source for dynamic information to feed into workflows or tasks. Agents – Integration with IT and Business Applications, tracking status and capturing data and output from tasks for reporting, notifications, or so it can be fed into the next task. Platform Independent Open Scripting – Use whatever scripting language (Ex: Perl, Python, Groovy, etc.) you are comfortable with to create more customized automation actions. Templates, Blueprints and Action Packs – Our solution spans enterprise IT and business applications. Out of the box we have many of the common (and some not-so-common) functions, workflows, and templates that developers and self-service users will need to execute and configure workflows. You can: Alter our best-practice workflows to suit your environment, Drag and drop system and application action into workflows and specify what parameters should be used for execution, Package Manager – Wrap complete solutions, including scripts, UI customizations, and additional framework elements, into a consolidated, versioned package. You can install complete solutions into your environments knowing all the necessary customizations and add-ons are implemented and consistent with what was developed/tested against.
- With these distinctions and our approach to simplifying the complexity inherent in the modern enterprise One Automation can address the diverse business and IT needs of end-users. Our platform gives users the ability to focus on solving the problem rather than having to write scripts and code that requires them to become a subject matter experts across multiple technologies. One Automation eliminates the complexity by giving end-users in operations, development and business roles what they need to solve problems at their level of knowledge. Here are the components of our solution that make this possible: Automic’s One Automation Engine is at the heart of our stack. It provides mission-critical workflow execution, monitoring, and complex dependency processing functionality (among other things). It is scalable to any Enterprise environment, so it can meet your current or future processing requirement without significant system alterations. It has a clustered architecture so processing will not be stopped if machines fail or are taken off-line. API: Industries most comprehensive development kit – The same API we use for our front-end client is fully available to developers for UI customization, direct application-to-automation integration, and to feed dashboard and reporting information. ECC – Customizable UI: Our web-based UI is role-driven so the end users experience can be customized to their role. As Automic and our community add functionality UI elements can be hot-plugged into a runing system for uninterruped service while you add new solutions to the platform. Adapters – Stateless integration to technologies like Web Services and JMS. These technologies can be called from Jobs or used as the source for dynamic information to feed into workflows or tasks. Agents – Integration with IT and Business Applications, tracking status and capturing data and output from tasks for reporting, notifications, or so it can be fed into the next task. Platform Independent Open Scripting – Use whatever scripting language (Ex: Perl, Python, Groovy, etc.) you are comfortable with to create more customized automation actions. Templates, Blueprints and Action Packs – Our solution spans enterprise IT and business applications. Out of the box we have many of the common (and some not-so-common) functions, workflows, and templates that developers and self-service users will need to execute and configure workflows. You can: Alter our best-practice workflows to suit your environment, Drag and drop system and application action into workflows and specify what parameters should be used for execution, Package Manager – Wrap complete solutions, including scripts, UI customizations, and additional framework elements, into a consolidated, versioned package. You can install complete solutions into your environments knowing all the necessary customizations and add-ons are implemented and consistent with what was developed/tested against.
- AMC Cinema in the US wanted to engage through social media channels but instead of just talking they wanted it to drive business value. The project looked at the ability to drive up attendance on films that were not attracting enough of an audience based on the business plans of the cinema. Several options where being discussed on various ways to run the campaign but they always came back to the struggle of determining when a campaign should start and importantly, if it worked, when the campaign should stop. Luckily, when they discussed with IT someone in the room remembered the original pitch to the company, they bought for scheduling but he remembered the architecture diagram we looked at and connected the dots.
- A compenent of the platform allows us to watch data feeds and then draw conclusions from the patterns that emerge – rules can also be placed on these feeds of information to cause reaction. In AMC’s environment it was connected to POS feeds as well as the business targets for the films to be shown. The idea is that rules can then be created which causes different types of campaigns to be executed depending on how close to film showing and how bad the sales were. The ONE Automation platform was also connected to external systems to cause twitter feed updates, facebook posts via web services as well as e-mail and SMS campaigns to registered users.
- Within the solution the business could now set rules as to when sales were deemed to be below target, what type of campaigning should start and obviously the ability to stop the campaign if successful and sales become on target. General campaigns can be set for all films (but the campaign will still be specific to the film itself) or for certain films specific campaigning can occur, this might be to drive higher attendences for new blockbusters.
- The result – when attendance is below expectation media campaigns are launched relevant to the film. With the feeds to the point of sales systems these campaign can stop as attendance is driven back to normal levels – in this example we could of course just keep running the campaign, but some of the campaigns will offer regular clients additional discounts and those of course we want to stop once we start seeing an impact on revenue (attendance).
- commercial finance is the function of offering loans to businesses. This customer also excepts Receivables from invoices as security. It implies that the decision whether to except the request for a loan has to be fast and stream lined because the customer uses this way of financing to bypass a financial gap or to pre-financing a large project which they had won. Once the money arrived from the customer, the loan get paid back and a fee on top. The process to validate the customer request includes files and documents from various internal and external parties. They have to be collected in order to continue with the decision process. This collection process, beside others, are driven by Automic
- This is just a clip of the full process. This picture illustrates how to manage documents which was received via email or FTP server. In case of the FTP server, the external partner upload the document to a FTP server. Automic FTP Agent monitors the FTP Server and once the document was uploaded, the Agent create a backup directory for all documents of the day. It uses the as directory the current date. Every document which was copied from the FTP server, get also copied as backup in the directory. These jobs make use of the full functionality of the FTP agent, which can do much more than copying files.inbox Email is a very easy to use way of delivering files, despite that limited security and reliability. However Automic Email Agent makes it very easy it monitor an IMAP Inbox. Once an email which meets a specific criteria has arrived in the Inbox, the Agent reads the email content and stores the attached files locally. An follow up job copy the file. Once the file has received and copied Automic notifies the parties and start consolidating the information
- Another area to extend automation is to run more of what the user does. This might be from the older text based systems or basic windows systems that need the data entered into a field and then a button clicked. The Automic prompts makes it easy to create easy to use input forms which requested the information required to continue the process. List an checkboxes helping to avoid typos or wrong input values.
- A big mobile phone had the issue to consolidate their customer onboarding procedure. Several years ago they suffered with significant customer service issues. For example, when the iphone 4 came out it involved a sim change for all. For this client this involved between 5 and six separate systems many of which were very old and data had to be manually transposed between then. This would take a few days just to process the sim change – this meant it would take days, and the new customers were hitting the call centre but also being vocal on social media.
- Management deemed this unacceptable and had to be resolved. But to connect all the steps together was not going to be easy – especially in calling back to the business if something goes wrong. The looked at ONE Automation to automate the process, event the green screen processing through QTP emulation. This allowed them to model the entire process across all existing systems and more than halve the time for sim changes. They have gone on to automate each of the business processes in the company which has dramatically improved service to customers but also allowed staff that were doing manual activities to be deployed across the company in higher value positions. Importantly, during automation we was not rip and replacing lots of technology but working with what the company had and allowing them to use that as efficiently as possible whilst still remaining in control – at any time, on any automated business process problems are instantly raised back to the business users for resolution.
- Not only are things faster they are scaleable – the limiting human factor has been removed where we just needed them to type and click. They can get on with the important matter of keeping customers happy but it also drives down the unit cost of supporting customers.
- This is a very interesting customer. For some history, a major storm hit their area lasting 10 days, 1.2 million people impacted with outages. They received more than 10 million calls and 80% of them wanted to talk to a person – no company could manage that sort of volume. Post mortem they decided they had to do something to inform clients automatically – but they had to make certain of no false positive alerts were sent. They decided to get customers to register for online, text and call alerting of transmission issues as well as online service status. They used the Decision and Insight parts of our platform to monitor lots of diverse feeds of data, from databases, call centres volumes and grid network feeds to determine where problems where active, what people where affected and then alerting people to the issue and likely resolution times automatically. For example, one person calling in on a street saying they have a power outage doesn’t mean much but when three have done it in a timeframe then you probably have a distribution problem to the area. By looking at the network feeds they could determine how big a problem and then automatically instigate alerting. The end result is less people called – they already new. The service was then expanded to disconnection notices, metering and overdue notices being delivered through the same concepts – giving a full service customer notification platform above and beyond scheduling.
- The solution, although designed for the exceptional situation has also been targeted at many other business functions. It also includes not only detection but updating the CRM systems so that everyone knows what the customer has experienced and maintaining customer feedback on the service for further improvement and management reporting.
- Automic is used to determine that the event has occurred and then control the entire process. Not only informing the customers bet letting the business know it has been activated. It also automatically updates the CRM systems so that the call centre knows what the customer has been told – trying to close the loop on information.
- Customers want to be informed, and when done well they need to talk to less people and are much happier about being a customer – that is the benefit that this customer recorded. 30% less call activity but also a significant increase in customer satisfaction. And depending on the size of the organization the cash savings can mount up. But I think more important for this customer – they are ready should the next disaster strike and they wont get all the negative PR due to customer service – or lack of.
- Employee Access control can be much more than just granting access or posting the work time of an employee. Siemens had combined their User Access system MyTAM with Automic and has extended that capabilities extensively
- For example, the user access system reminds managers and employees when a certification is about to be expire and needs to be renewed. It rejects the access to a device if the certification has expired. The forklift checks if the driver has a valid certification to use the forklift. This is a security improvement because forklift a dangerous device and not easy to use. Also very dangerous are Xray Devices, only certificated and trained people are allowed to use them. MyTAM and Automic together take care that only right employees are allowed to access devices.
- The employee protection board specifies a minimum number of first aider per building. The access control system takes care that this regulation are always met. It also informs the responsible persons that additional employees needs to be trained as first aider. The penalty can be savior from the employee protection board, not to mention the personal implication when an accident victim is a not treated correctly
- I am sorry, DR is never a joke and we always have plans in place to handle the disaster situation. It is true, we have to prove to auditors or the board that plans are in place, we have to run drills to prove that it is effective but importantly within IT management we have to have confidence that it will work seamlessly if and when required. I have had a lot of discussion with prospects on purchasing DR instances of the solution, and hotly contested statements on its discount policy. But here is a use case that actually makes use of those licenses – which will at least make purchasing happier
- The most important part of Disaster Recovery is the “planning”, which needs to happen every time a major system upgrade or enhancement is made Disaster Recovery planning is resource-intensive, it requires administrators and specialists from across IT, it is time-consuming, and it can fail with small deviations from the established process Few more details Start with discussing the primary site, which consists of network, servers and storage devices. The challenges with Disaster Recovery are considerable In most organizations, the failover site is a pure physical replication of the production/primary site. Customers are asking Clearly, maintaining redundant physical infrastructure is wasteful and expensive. Is there any way to utilize this infrastructure? My infrastructure is constantly growing. How can I afford to grow the idle infrastructure at the same rate? People & Processes How do I reproduce the process I followed during my last successful DR test? My applications changed since the last DR test? How do I capture this in my new DR process? I haven’t tested my DR process in a year. Will my DR process succeed if there’s a disaster tomorrow? I want to test my DR plan, but it might disrupt my production systems. How do I minimize the risk? I can’t afford to have my key people spend a day on testing my DR plan. How can I make this less painful? Every time I’ve tried testing my DR plan before, it has failed. How do I improve my chances of success? Management Tools What is the “system of record” for my heterogeneous IT infrastructure? How do I ensure that my source environment is faithfully replicated during a DR test? How do I automate the DR process for all IT domains (server, network, storage, client)?
- Using many of the ITPA actions in the toolset for ONE Automation customers have modelled all the activities required to execute the DR Plan. Normally they are doing this by service, so this could also be used around HA for each service. The screen here is a portal view generated by the customer that shows current state in real-time. Not just where are my services being delivered from but also the readiness of each service to switch and any associated data loss that may occur by service and the last time a drill was run to test the process. This interface also allows for DR to be instigated by service (through a rest web service call) as well as the failback process when we want to get back to normality.
- Beyond our day to day activity this also allows us to present to the board and our auditors how well we have done, the quality of the service, frequency and results of drills – from my background of operations management I like this solution the best
- Last but not least I would like to present you a use case from a large sport ware manufacturer. Due to the size of the organization, the shop replenishment process, is huge and included 30 distributed schedules which are not $U. The update date process of the scheduler took a long time and had and cased often a delay in the process. The distributed architecture made it also complicated to monitor the systems. It happened that errors were not recognized in time.
- Automic was able to take over the tasks from the 30 other schedule solutions and integrates SAP and non SAP solution, plus it connects to the Warehouse System and the Point of Sales in the shops. It provides the full control over all steps of the replenishment process and which has the advantage that the issues with Workflow updates and the error reporting are solved. Beside that extensive dashboard monitoring the most important KPIs