Fuel and convenience retailer taps cloud integration platform to enable business transformation and accelerate speed of IT delivery.
Boomi, a leading provider of cloud-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS), has revealed that Ampol is using the Boomi AtomSphere Platform to drive agility and speed to market for critical business projects.
Boomi enables Ampol to deliver new system integration services 70% faster and at 30% of the previous cost, providing a secure and scalable way of connecting customer, supplier and SaaS platforms to its self-hosted IT applications.
The speed and reduced cost of leveraging the Boomi platform has allowed Ampol IT to deliver many projects, including smaller projects that previously would not have had viable business cases.
To become an agile organization that can adapt to fast-changing market conditions and customer demands, Ampol, Australia’s leading transport fuels provider that serves 80,000 business customers every year and three million retail customers every week, has overhauled its digital capabilities. The company is leveraging a service-based architecture to connect myriad systems and data across the supply chain.
Its ambitions inspired a multi-year strategy that required a major cloud migration and replacing legacy, on-premises systems with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. Ampol also needed a unified integration solution to connect these new digital investments and provide a single conduit of data sets across all technologies and processes.
“In an organization as diverse as Ampol – running hundreds of technology solutions crucial to daily workflows, retail operations and customer experience initiatives – we needed something in the middle to connect the data being generated,” said Lindsay Hoare, Head of Technology at Ampol. “We also needed to orchestrate it across the organization. This became especially important once we started bringing new digital assets to the business.”
Ampol implemented Boomi to replace what Hoare calls a ‘spaghetti junction’ featuring hundreds of on-premises, point-to-point integrations.
“As well as connecting Ampol’s IT environment, Boomi feeds accurate information back into our enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform in near-real-time so it can be analyzed to inform business decisions – for example, fuel prices, stock levels and shipping activities,” added Hoare.
“With a single, automated platform handling information anonymously, our people can get on with their jobs.
“We don’t need to think about how the data got there, whether it’s reliable or protected, or if there could be missing pieces.”
Ampol has built and launched a suite of core reusable integration services with Boomi that have been repurposed hundreds of times, enabling critical business functions and linking core business applications, including the ERP platform, customer relationship management (CRM), point-of-sales (POS) and supply chain systems.
With a two-tier architecture stack and Boomi’s low-code design, Ampol is enabling a common cybersecurity framework to be easily maintained and implemented, while also allowing for more rapid development of integration services.
“The Boomi AtomSphere Platform is our data gateway; it’s the single entry and exit point for Ampol data, which promotes security because we aren’t forced to make Swiss cheese from our corporate firewall,” said Hoare.
One of Ampol’s first Boomi projects was to implement an integrated bulk fuel ordering process for its commercial fuel customers. This process has already been reused over 60 times and is enabling supply chain deals to be delivered reliably against tight timeframes.
“Boomi’s reusability and service-driven architecture has helped us deliver new services to stakeholders much faster, reduced integration costs and increased reliability as we’ve eliminated extensive manual data entry from our employees’ workflows,” said Hoare.
He continued: “In another example, the on-going administration and logistics behind our rebrand to Ampol required significant updates to site information to ensure all data points are accurate. Boomi provided a single, reusable master data service that didn’t require any manual re-entry at any stage of the Location Master project. The data could be maintained once, extracted, and then, using APIs, securely transmitted to the correct endpoints – whether it’s the Ampol FuelPay mobile app, Google Maps or the Site locator on the Ampol public website.”
Ampol also leveraged Boomi to efficiently onboard vendors from various EDI gateways on to a single EDI provider for more streamlined procurement of merchandise for its retail network.
Additional outcomes include:
• Simplified compliance and reporting: Various Australian State Governments require fuel retailers to report changes within prescribed timeframes. Using Boomi, Ampol set up automated processes to relay near-real-time data from the field into a specialist pricing modelling engine to allow compliance to the price reporting regimes to be monitored with confidence.
• Decommissioned on-premises legacy middleware platform: Now that the cloud-based Boomi AtomSphere Platform has improved connectivity across the enterprise, Ampol could decommission its legacy on-premises middleware platform – another step in its journey to shift all workloads from on-premises data centers to the cloud. Another benefit was productivity gains for its IT staff, who no longer are consumed with coding and supporting complex legacy integrations.
Ampol leveraged the services of Sydney-based IT services provider, Anatas, who provided Ampol with specialist integration consulting expertise, resources and architectural guidance.
“Bad data causes outages in the integration landscape, which quickly leads to broader business disruption as departments, teams and customers struggle with the consequences of outdated or missing information,” said Jason Frost, Chief Executive Officer at Anatas. “As Ampol continues to diversify its services, Boomi provides an incredibly flexible and scalable ‘software glue’ that structures systems and data to stand the test of time and deliver the right information wherever it’s needed.”
“Ampol is an iconic brand engrained in Australia’s consumer and business landscape, making connected data a critical factor in building intelligence across such a large-scale operation,” said David Irecki, Director Solutions Consulting APJ at Boomi. “Through its pragmatic investments – and adopting the Boomi AtomSphere Platform to steer its Digital Transformation – Ampol has engineered a digital landscape that drives integrated experiences for Australian consumers and companies globally. From managing shipping activities, stock levels and supply right through to fuel prices and its fuel card initiative, Ampol can rely on Boomi’s low-code integration to keep its systems and data connected.”
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