Australian energy provider realizes 80% reduction in integration time, speeding time-to-value while optimizing processes.
Business goals
Origin is a leading energy provider for Australian homes and businesses, covering the energy supply chain from power generation to retail. It has more than 4.5 million customer accounts and is also an upstream operator of Australia Pacific LNG.
Origin wanted to unlock data insights to improve decision-making across every facet of the organization. Its goal was to modernize core applications and establish mechanisms to streamline the discovery, classification, validation and presentation of connected data. This would underscore the organization’s core strategic pillars, centered on optimizing operations now and into the future.
Integration is integral to each part of this process, connecting fundamental information – production data in the field, landholder data, plant and facility metrics and everything in between. This data is used for intraday operational decisions as well as long-term decisions around investment planning.
Technology challenges
Origin uses hundreds of technology systems and applications to undertake a variety of activities from deciding where and how to dig, through to getting gas on to ships and supplying that utility to its customers. But its data was siloed and inconsistent and therefore difficult to leverage effectively for business operations.
Origin needed to combine data from a number of disparate platforms and vendor solutions at various stages of maturity. Each of these systems presented data in different formats, with different levels of quality. The company was managing integration in a manual and time-consuming way, requiring individuals to retrieve data as and when it was needed and then manipulate it primarily in spreadsheets.
“Boomi integrates core applications, data and platforms across the gas and retail businesses, providing a reliable and uncomplicated foundation to drive informed decision-making across every part of the company,” said Sripurna Das, Technology Head of IT Data Services and Support, Origin Energy.
How Boomi helped
With the Boomi AtomSphere Platform, Origin is able to quickly connect applications that were not designed to natively communicate with each other. Boomi acts as an orchestrated business process platform with governance built around it to ensure quality, accuracy and reusability of core integrations as they are built.
Origin utilizes the Boomi platform to supercharge its application modernization strategy. Since first deploying Boomi’s Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS), Origin has created 1,500 integrations that connect various applications across the organization.
Close collaboration and attention to detail by Boomi’s local team was a crucial factor in the deployment’s broad-ranging outcomes. This helped the Origin engineering team show what was possible, ultimately building an environment that could scale sustainably with minimal operational overheads.
“We have grown our integration capabilities sustainably and without complexity, allowing us to minimize our endpoints, remain consistent and ultimately feed accurate data to wherever it’s needed for every function that needs it,” said Sripurna Das, Technology Head of IT Data Services and Support, Origin Energy.
Results and business outcomes
With Boomi replacing hand-coded integration work, Origin has hastened speed-to-market significantly. Integration build processes that would take up to six weeks with a traditional legacy integration platform, take an average of just one week.
As well as realizing time savings of about 80% over a traditional legacy integration platform, Origin has freed up its highly skilled IT team to focus on high-value work, with all 1,500 integrations managed by just one dedicated integration lead from a platform perspective and a small group of core data owners to manage data exceptions.
Boomi helps inform intraday optimization, such as monitoring trends of pipelines and equipment, planning for fields and drilling, understanding where money is spent, determining and managing environmental impact, analyzing regulatory obligations, safety, creating an end-to-end audit trail alongside governance automation and much more.
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