Success Stories

German ERP-Software Company

Integrate Rexx HR with central Data Warehouse

Challenge

  • All HR data siloed in Rexx HR software.
  • No visibility or reporting on HR data for 1200 employees.
  • Without a structured data basis for reporting, management has to rely on highly manual, high-effort and low-frequency reports to make decisions.
  • No KPIs for HR. A lot is simply not known.

Solution

  • Automated data request, data validation, data preparation and loading of structured data into the central data warehouse (DWH) with Cloudomation.
  • 6 days of effort to set up the integration.

Result

  • HR data for 1200 employees available in structured format in the central DWH.
  • Regular automated reports are run on the new consolidated data basis.
  • Management has full visibility of HR data and has a solid data basis for decisions.
  • Data is checked thoroughtly during each load. Errors or missing data are spotted immediately.
  • Notifications are sent automatically if data issues are detected. Issues can be fixed very quickly, preventing data loss and problems downstream.
  • Data can be combined and analysed jointly with other data sources in the central DWH, e.g. financial data.
  • No more time consuming highly manual and highly error prone reports are written based on manual research done in the Rexx HR system.

Details

  1. A Cloudomation on-premise instance was set up within company’s data center.
  2. Data is requested from several JSON APIs from the Rexx HR software.
    1. Different data categories are accessed via different API endpoints. 
    2. Due to limitations of REXX HR APIs, only a specific amount of data can be accessed via one API. Therefore, data sets are split up and accessed in parts from different APIs.
  3. E-mail notifications are sent in case of persistent failure to access any API.
  4. For each of the data categories, all the individual data parts are validated:
    1. Check if the same number of records exists for each part.
    2. Check if data is complete.
  5. E-mail notifications are sent if data checks fail.
  6. Data is prepared for further processing:
    1. String fields contain amounts and currency information as string are split up into numeric fields for amount, and a separate currency column.
    2. Data types are set.
    3. Data sets are merged.
    4. Column names are changed to fit requirements of the DWH.
  7. E-mail  notifications are sent if data pre-processing fails.
  8. Data is loaded into DWH.
  9. Stored procedure for reporting is triggered in the DWH. 
  10. Result of stored procedure is monitored. E-mail notifications are sent if the stored procedure returns an error.

A Cloudomation automation expert and a Cloudomation project manager coordinated with internal and external stakeholders to conduct detailed requirements engineering. In close consultation with company’s business stakeholders, Cloudomation project management coordinated with client’s internal functions to gather all necessary information and accesses. The automated process was developed in close collaboration with external developers responsible for the DWH and the reporting process. 

  • Add additional HR data categories to the data processing pipeline.
  • Add more detailed monitoring of post-processing in DWH to ensure success of the entire process, including the steps happening outside of Cloudomation.
  • Automate data delivery of processed HR data from DWH to project management software, ticketing software and ERP software. 
  • Cloudomation will support the client in achieving gold-standard data management across departments and data siloes by functioning as central automation, orchestration and monitoring layer for data integration. 

Swiss Software Company

Automated payslip delivery to HR tool

Challenge

  • Over 300 employees need access to payslips in HR tool.
  • Payroll tool which produces payslips lacks functionality to deliver payslips directly to HR tool.
  • Existing integration layer lacks crucial functionality: cannot read pdf payslips to extract employee number and cannot upload pdf files to HR tool.
  • Customer spends significant amount of manual work to get the payslips deliverd to the HR tool and still faces errors in payslip delivery.

Solution

  • Payslip delivery automated with Cloudomation.
  • 12 hours of effort for developing automation script.

Result

  • Payslips are delivered automatically.
  • Delivery of correct payslip to each employee is ensured.
  • Fully documented audit trail of payslip delivery.
  • Notifications in place for invalid employee numbers and excess payslips.
  • Process can now be extended to automate more tasks in HR administration.

Details

  1. Payslips are uploaded in bulk to Cloudomation.
  2. Parse payslip pdf files to extract employee number.
  3. Access HR database to extract mapping of employee numbers between payslip tool and HR tool, which use different employee numbering systems.
  4. Check: Correct employee number in payslip pdf?
  5. Check: Each payslip can be assigned to an employee? (No excess payslips.)
  6. Create report containing all successful uploads and any issues that were encountered. If there are issues, all valid pdfs are still uploaded.
  7. Upload individual payslips to correct employee account in HR tool. Employees can now see and download their payslips in the HR tool. 

One Business Applications Manager from the customer and one Automation Specialist from Cloudomation met for two afternoons. With support from our expert, the Business Applications Manager developed the automation script himself. He now owns the process and can extend and adapt it on his own.

  • Streamlining automated process: parallel processing of pdfs, parallel creation of employee number mapping.
  • Direct automated download of payslip pdfs from source.
  • Dynamic update of employee number mapping for new or resigning employees.

Deployment Automation

Challenge

  • More than 100 dedicated customer servers worldwide.
  • Deploying new instance manually took more than two hours.
  • Errors happened frequently.
  • A lot of manual work to get the job done and afterwards additional time spent on troubleshooting and fixing errors.

Solution

  • Automation of deployment with Cloudomation.
  • 8 hours of effort for developing automation script.

Result

  • Deploying new instance takes 5 minutes.
  • Error-free deployment.
  • Full audit trail of deployment.
  • Anyone can deploy new instances, not just System Administrators.
  • Parallel deployments possible.
  • New automated process fully accepted by the employees.
  • Increased Customer service quality.
  • Reduced significantly time-to-market to onboard new customers.

Details

  1. Spin up AWS machine of specific type.
  2. Configure security groups.
  3. Configure network.
  4. Configure hard disk.
  5. Set up operating system.
  6. Install, update, and configure libraries.
  7. Download, set up and configure software product.
  8. Create account for customer on software product.
  9. Send notification email with login credentials to System Administrator, who does a final check and then forwards the credentials to the customer.

One System Administrator from Semantic Web Company and one Automation Specialist from Cloudomation sat together one afternoon. The System Administrator didn’t know Python. With support from our expert, he was able to develop the automation script himself. He now owns the process and can extend and adapt it on his own.

  • Extend the automated process for additional deployment options, e.g. on different environments and with different components.
  • Add steps before and after the process, e.g. a quick test after deployment finished, and direct send out of credentials to the customer. 
  • Automate roll-out of updates and other maintenance processes.

Austrian Software Company

Integration of Time Tracking and Work Planning Software

Challenge

  • Work planning and time tracking take place in different tools (Jira and Clockify).
  • Times cannot be reliably assigned to tasks.

Solution

  • Integration of time tracking in Clockify with work planning in Jira via Cloudomation.

Result

  • Employees track time directly in Jira and don't have to use another tool.
  • Time tracking is much faster: the timer is started directly in the Jira ticket. Description and project are updated automatically. No manual steps necessary.
  • Higher quality of time tracking: descriptions and projects are always filled in and correct.

Details

  1. Free Clockify-Jira-plugin was installed. With the plugin, times can be tracked in tickets directly via the Jira user interface. The plugin transfers the Jira ticket number and the title of the ticket to Clockify.
  2. In Jira, ticket epics are assigned that represent customer projects and internal projects.
  3. For billing, it is important to be able to correctly assign times to individual projects.
  4. Cloudomation was used to automate the assignment of projects in Clockify so that they are automatically transferred from Jira:
    •  The ticket number is taken from the description of Clockify time recording.
    • Epic is requested in Jira.
    • Clockify project is mapped to Jira epic.
    • Projects are updated automatically in Clockify.
  5. Billing of customer work to the minute is now possible.
  6. Time spent on individual tickets is now directly visible.
  7. Time recording effort for employees is significantly lower because they can do everything directly in Jira

A project manager from Cloudomation developed the integration according to her own requirements within half a day.

  • Automatic creation of Clockify projects based on Jira epics, so that project planning can take place entirely in Jira.
  • Notifications for project managers when the workload for certain projects is reached or exceeded.
  • Automatic creation of time reports for customers from Clockify projects with nice formatting and only necessary fields.

Integrate webshop with an inventory management system

Challenge

  • Highly successful webshop not integrated with inventory management system.
  • 4+ hours / week manual effort to enter orders into the inventory management system.
  • Manual rounding led to differences in prices between different systems, causing problems.
  • Only one person knew the process - orders not processed during holidays and sick leave.
  • A lot of manual work keeping us away from focusing on important elements to increase revenue and profit.

Solution

  • Integration of webshop and inventory management system via Cloudomation.
  • 2 days of effort to set up the integration.

Result

  • New orders are processed fully automatically.
  • 4+ hours per week time saved.
  • Prices are synchronised exactly. No more rounding differences.
  • Orders are processed independently of employees, also on weekends, holidays, and during the night.
  • Employees are freed up for customer care and more high-value tasks.
  • Webshop is now ready to grow even further. More orders can be processed quickly and easily.
  • We defined a plan to spend more time on customer facing improvements with the ultimate goal to increase customer loyalty and revenue.
  • Extension of integration possible to connect more systems, e.g. accounting.

Details

  1. Order information is requrested from SaaS webshop system (Magento) via REST API.
    • Product information: ID, amount, discount codes. 
    • Customer information: name, delivery address, invoice address, phone number, email address.
  2. New orders are requested every 30 minutes.
  3. Order information is transferred to the on-premise inventory management system (MS SQL) via the Cloudomation satellite.
  4. When the on-premise system is shut down or rebooted, the satellite automatically reconnects. Order processing continues at exactly the point of interruption. Double processing of orders or lost orders are impossible.
  5. Customer information is cross-checked with existing customers and classified: new or existing customer.
  6. Data wrangling to ensure correct processing:
    • All phone numbers are converted to the E.164 standard. Any international phone number can be processed.
    • Anomaly detection logic for intelligent mapping of existing customers:
      • Same customer name, but different phone number – assume phone number changed.
      • Same name, different delivery address – assume moved.
      • Same name and both different address and phone number – assume different person with same name.
  7. New customers are created in the inventory management system. 
  8. Order is created in the inventory management system. Invoice and delivery slip are created.
  9. Packaging and shippping are the only manual steps left in the process.

A Cloudomation automation expert conducted an in-depth requirements analysis with Aras employees who are responsible for the order process. This was followed by a technical audit in coordination with external IT service providers: the webshop hosting provider, as well as the inventory managemet system development company. The integration was developed by Cloudomation in close coordination with Aras. During a six week trial period Aras was able to fully test the process. Minor adaptations were done to ensure every possible scenario is covered. After go-live of the process, we continue to support Aras in the use of the process and work with them to extend it further. 

  • Extend the process to automatically print delivery slip and invoice on the warehouse printer so that the warehouse has a physical “to-do” package of delivery slips.
  • Add automatical send-out of dispatch notice and invoice to customers after package has been handed over to logistics partner.
  • Automatic forwarding of invoice information to accountant’s software.
  • Automatic send-out of vouchers and other loyalty program items to customers two weeks after their last purchase.

Viennese SaaS Company

Application Release Automation

Challenge

  • Need to support several releases per day.
  • Poor performance of build process automation with build service of popular cloud provider.
  • Build failed frequently.
  • When working, build took 15 minutes.
  • Error prone release process resulting in additional time spend on fixing issues and getting the release job done.

Solution

  • Automate build process with Cloudomation.
  • 3 days of effort for developing automation script.

Result

  • Build completes much faster: 2-3 minutes.
  • Build completes reliably without errors.
  • Build automation script is a lot shorter and clearer. Before: 693 lines of code, now: 360 lines of code.
  • More granular control of build steps.
  • Extension of process automation is now possible.
  • Developers focus on coding and bringing new features out instead of fixing release errors.

Details

  1. Integration with git source control system: git commit triggers build.
  2. Source code extracted from git.
  3. Components are built and deployed in fixed order. This was much easier to do in Cloudomation than before. 
  4. Build completes in 2-3 minutes. Before it took 15 minutes.

One Automation Expert from Cloudomation developed the build automation flow script based on the previously used build script. In cooperation with the build master, our expert was able to improve elegance and performance of the build process significantly.

  • Further improve performance by only building components with committed changes, instead of always running a full build.
  • Extend build automation into full CI/CD pipeline.

Austrian Software Company

Website Management: Release and Backups

Challenge

  • Difficulty managing changes to the website.
  • Half-ready pages and changes that still had errors were often published accidentally.
  • Updates of plugins often caused problems.
  • No simple way of restoring previous versions if an update caused problems.

Solution

  • Set-up of separate development and productive website.
  • Automation of website release, backups, and rollbacks with Cloudomation.

Result

  • All changes to the content are done on the development website. No half-ready content is published accidentally any more.
  • Even large changes to the website can now be managed easily.
  • All plugin updates are tested on the development instance. No problems on the productive website due to updates.
  • If an update causes problems on the development website, a rollback can be done easily and quickly.
  • Much more frequent updates because it is now easy and risk-free.
  • With each release of the website, there are now tests: all forms and links are checked. Quality of the website improved a lot.

Details

  1. The website environment was cloned. One environment was defined as development website, and the second as productive website.
  2. Separate URLs were deinfed for the development and the productive website. No-index and no-follow flags were set for the development website, so that search engines to not lead visitors to the development website.
  3. The release process was automated:
    • A full database backup of both the development and productive website is created.
    • The backup is restored in the productive environment.
    • Base-URLs are updated to fit the productive website URL.
    • No-index and no-follow flags are removed for the productive website.
    • A link-checker is run on the new productive website. Any dead links are reported via email to the person who triggered the release.
  4. The release process transfers not just changesd concent, but also all updates to the backend, plugins etc.
  5. The person who triggered the website release is informed via email once the release is complete, which takes about seven minutes (including the link-checker). Information about any issues found are included in the email.
  6. If there are problems with the website, a roll-back can be triggered. Any old backup can be chosen to be restored to the productive website. Usually, the backup created right before the release is restored. 
  7. Restoring the backup takes about three minutes.
  8. Updates of plugins are tested in the development instance before release. Only working updates are released.
  9. Because the release process is so easy, changes are published frequently. Even small improvements are always carried out consistently in the development instance and then released. Nobody logs in to the productive website to make changes.

A Cloudomation automation expert worked with the marketing team to develop the release process. A first version was ready in less than a week, with total effort of about two days invested. Iterative improvements were added over the following six weeks to improve user experience. Total effort was about three days. Now, the marketing team is in control of the release process, updates, tests and even restoring backups without any dependence on IT.

Through this project, the marketing team became a big fan of automation and has started to come up with many areas where autoamtion can help:

  • Adding checks for performence (page loading times) in the release process.
  • Integration of newsletter tool with website signup form. Currently, a standard plugin is used with limited flexibility regarding styling of the form.
  • Flexible integration of other forms on the website with other tools, e.g. calendar, ticketing system, and CRM.
  • Automatic cleanup of website: removing unused elements from the media library, flagging private pages and templates that haven’t been used in a long time for deletion etc.
  • Website uptime and performance monitoring.

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