CCL now helps more than 500 clients improve their business efficiencies and agility through its technology consulting and technical services. But until recently, CCL itself had room for improvement — in particular, integrating mission-critical data between core business systems.
CCL, with seven locations in New Zealand, used point-to-point SQL scripts to get invoice and purchase order data from an Autotask IT business managementapplication to its Microsoft Dynamics GP financials system. The integration was unreliable and required nearly 20 hours a week of costly maintenance and troubleshooting — all by a developer who otherwise would be generating revenue by working on client projects.
“The SQL scripts were very complex, slow, not reliable and the error handling was poor as well,” says Vicky Harvey, a CCL systems specialist. “Our SQL developer was spending 70 hours a month in maintenance handholding those data feeds. It got to the point where we decided we needed an integration platform to build efficiency and eliminate all that manual overhead.”
CCL found the answer to its integration needs with Dell Boomi. By deploying the Boomi integration platform, the company cut the time it needed for integration projects in half. It also eliminated 80 hours a month of manual work in IT maintenance and finance administration. And now it has much more up-to-date operational information. With Boomi, it can run invoice integrations automatically every hour, compared to two or three times a week in the past.
And that is just the beginning. As it adopts more cloud applications in a best-of-breed environment, it has a highly efficient, cloud-native integration platform to pursue continued innovation and focus on delivering services and support to its clients.
“Seamless integration is critical as CCL looks to leverage a wide variety of SaaSand PaaS technologies,” says Kelvin Brown, CCL business delivery manager. “Boomi provides the platform for us to do that without worrying about how to integrate data and applications.”
Harvey says Boomi’s unified platform was another factor in its decision. With multiple integration tools on one platform, CCL can not only build and manage various integrations but also govern data quality, create automated workflows, and carryout API and B2B/EDI integrations.
And as an added bonus, CCL appreciated Boomi’s free training and certificationprograms.
“Boomi had all the functionality we needed for more complex integrations, and can support our need for continued integration and automation as we modernize our best-of-breed environment,” Harvey says.
For its initial integration between its cloud-based Autotask and on-premise Microsoft Dynamics GP for accounting, CCL engaged Adaptiv Integration, a Boomi partner and integration consultancy based in New Zealand.
Adaptiv collaborated with CCL on requirements gathering, proof of concept, and mapping business logic to get purchase order and invoice data from Autotask into CCL’s Microsoft Dynamics GP system of record.
Harvey says Boomi’s unified platform was another factor in its decision. With multiple integration tools on one platform, CCL can not only build and manage various integrations but also govern data quality, create automated workflows, and carryout API and B2B/EDI integrations.
And as an added bonus, CCL appreciated Boomi’s free training and certificationprograms.
“Boomi had all the functionality we needed for more complex integrations, and can support our need for continued integration and automation as we modernize our best-of-breed environment,” Harvey says.
For its initial integration between its cloud-based Autotask and on-premise Microsoft Dynamics GP for accounting, CCL engaged Adaptiv Integration, a Boomi partner and integration consultancy based in New Zealand.
Adaptiv collaborated with CCL on requirements gathering, proof of concept, and mapping business logic to get purchase order and invoice data from Autotask into CCL’s Microsoft Dynamics GP system of record.
And CCL’s finance team is saving about 10 hours a month by eliminating manual work. Invoice feeds now run automatically each hour, compared to two or three invoice runs on average each week that finance had to request of IT, improving data timeliness. Weekly purchase order integrations are also automated.
“Automated integration through Boomi makes life easier for the finance team because they have predictability and know what to expect,” Harvey says. “Data is getting into Microsoft Dynamics GP much faster, so finance can be more efficient in creating invoices and carrying out their processes.”
Given all the reliability and error headaches CCL had in the past, Harvey especially appreciates the simplicity and transparency of real-time process monitoring in Boomi.
“It’s very easy to review feeds in Boomi, and the ability to set up error notifications is really useful as well,” she says. “Both integrations have been running really well and we get very, very few errors.”
Harvey credited Adaptiv for helping CCL quickly achieve its first success with Boomi.
“Adaptiv was very good on working closely with us to successfully implement our mappings,” Harvey says. “They’re very responsive to any urgent requests. We’ve been very happy with the work they’ve done.”
“Our success in using Boomi between Autotask and our finance system has provided insight into the numerous other automation and integration opportunities that we have across our multiple platforms,” Brown says. “We’re already on to the next project in which integration via Boomi will be a key component.”