ORIGIN ENERGY
Energy company connects critical systems with ease
An ASX Listed organisation in the energy industry needed a real-time integration between their Employee Central Payroll (ECP), Oracle Finance (FI) and SAP S/4HANA solutions. By partnering with Nano, the organisation benefited from a solution that securely acquires, validates and posts data, 100% serverlessly, with no down-time.
LOCATION
Australia
INDUSTRY
Energy
EMPLOYEES
5,000
PROBLEM STATEMENT
A large ASX Listed energy provided required a real-time integration between Employee Central Payroll (ECP) and its existing Oracle Finance (FI) solution for payroll GL postings. A key pain point existed in that there were no suitable out of the box integrations between SAP and Oracle and this would be complex data transformation between the two systems. With a new FI solution S/4HANA coming into the organisation and since soon it was also desirable to have an integration which could easily adapt to this new environment when it became available, requiring minimal or no rework.
OUR SOLUTION
nanoConnect
nanoConnect isn’t just a static iPaaS, it is highly adaptable to different operating models and integration requirements of enterprise customers. From a base deployment of nanoConnect our customer has been able to achieve a highly complex and secure integration with few additions. Rather, with many of the components required for this integration available in the base deployment, the development team are able to focus on the business logic.
Integration Overview
When SAP (ECP or on-prem) Payroll posting documents are generated, nano’s solution securely receives the posting data from SAP and transforms it into a suitable format for Oracle FI. The transformed data is pushed securely to Oracle immediately. Oracle collects these files periodically for processing into Oracle FI. The solution appears SAP-native to the payroll team delivering the posting data to Oracle in seconds.
98%
Reduction in integration Opex compared to alternatives
ZERO
Down-time required to support maintenance and updates
88%
Reduction in integration capex required to build integrations
“Finance systems rarely play nice with one another, that's why traditional solutions are so difficult to implement. Nano solved the problem by quickly deploying serverless integrations that enable real-time data transfer between our corporate systems.”
Services Provided
Nano provided full-service support for the development of the integration including data gathering, solution design, business logic mapping and design of data transformation, storage, and processing workflows. The project was delivered in partnership with the customer’s configuration and IT and security teams to ensure they met stringent requirements for data security and processing accuracy. Nano developed the integrations to meet the customer’s business requirements including the deployment of assets in ECP.
Technical Details
At the ECP layer, nano implemented a lightweight solution built on SAP native components to support real-time direct transfer of payroll FI posting documents securely to nanoConnect. The complex data transformations needed to convert posting documents into Oracle format. This was performed within nanoConnect, and the resulting transformed documents then made available to existing ingest scripts in Oracle without needing rework to accommodate the new payroll system. As part of the move to SAP S4/HANA FI, no updates were required at the ECP side, a minor update to the nanoConnect integration facilitated data transfer to S4/HANA. Nano also deployed SAP native components for secure real-time ingest of data into S4.
CUSTOMER BENEFITS
Real-time Data
Real-time data transfer from ECP to Oracle and later to S/4HANA has reduced processing time for the client payroll and FI teams. Processing of payroll data and data validation is handled on the fly. The integration includes a separate API to allow the customer to easily update the data validation schema used. Nano’s integrations run so fast that the customer was surprised to see their systems updated before they could switch applications.
Zero down-time
Because of its serverless design nanoConnect doesn’t require down-time for maintenance and support, eliminating the need to pause critical business functions. Code updates when ready for production, have been deployed without the need for down-time.
Highly transparent workflows
The solution provides Teams and Email messaging based on each integration’s outcomes. This includes security notifications, positive processing, and error notifications, allowing teams to respond or follow up on specific events.
Eliminated bottlenecks
The event driven serverless design of integrations in nanoConnect allowed for automatic scaling of compute to handle large data volumes and high frequency transactions. As such the client was certain the only source of bottlenecks are the source and destination platform themselves.
Reducing reliance on specialists
Solutions written in nanoConnect don’t require specialist trained staff, instead, being based on node.js, integrations can be built with an unopinionated toolset. This leads to improvements in development time and an overall reduction in the cost of development using more abundant development resources.
Ensuring employee data security
The integration delivered built-in security features and reporting measures to ensure the highest levels of protection for employee data. White box penetration testing performed by a specialist security testing team revealed no security issues. Calls to the API made over HTTPS with custom authentication and authorization.
Well documented integration solutions
A key risk in integration development is the potential for a loss of knowledge when key people leave the organisation. With integrations on nanoConnect clearly documented as part of the gathering and design process and further documented in code (with in-line comments), this significantly reduces key-person risk surrounding the maintenance and support of integrations and any future modifications required to adapt to changing business requirements.