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Customer Snapshot
Company: Deutsche Post.com
Business/Industry: Services for electronic- and paper-based communication
Company Headquarters: Bonn, Germany
Webpage: www.dpwn.de
UC4 Customer: since 2002
The Company
Deutsche Post.com is a subsidiary of Deutsche Post AG, located in Bonn, employing around 50 specialists for electronic mail services. It specializes in outsourcing communication services for two key industries, energy suppliers and telecommunication providers. Both services are being offered to major German enterprises in these business sectors in order to save costs in their business processes and reduce the required in-house resources for regular communication activities.
The Challenge
For some four years, Deutsche Post.com have used a mixture of an EDI product, with schedulers and work-flow tools to deliver an automated meter reading and invoicing solution to their customers. With several heterogeneous steps and a large number of customers to service, the original solution lacked the intelligence, robustness and scalability required to monitor, improve and expand the service.
Deutsche Post.com moved to an Oracle Database in order to improve the capacity and robustness of the infrastructure, but, as the number of customers grew the complexity and variety of the solution stretched the capabilities of the existing tools and introduced heavy administrative workloads to manage the various tools and processes.
It was then that they decided to evaluate a more sophisticated automation and monitoring solutions. "We needed a product that could manage the scheduling and processing of the complete data-workflow solution", said Eddy van der Zee, Project Manager, Deutsche Post.com.
The requirement to run and monitor a long running business process (i.e. a process that may last for a number of hours, days or weeks) meant that no ordinary time and based scheduler would be sufficient. The selected product should be able to react to events, such as a certain file arriving or a certain amount of records being processed, in order to maximize the efficiency of the process in a 24x7 operation.
The Solution
"With the UC4 platform we found a product which combines intelligent multi-platform scheduling, integrated communications with remote systems and easy to use monitoring facilities", said van der Zee. The UC4 platform is an event based automation solution. It enables 24x7 automated operations through reacting to business, application and data events as opposed to the traditional tools that are restricted by date and time.
For Deutsche Post.com, the UC4 platform now automates and schedules the entire data-workflow process that obtains data from customers in order to print meter reading cards which are then posted to the end user. Once the card is returned and scanned (or completed on the internet) the UC4 platform automates the process to update the database, returning the enriched information to the utility company and (optionally) ultimately ending in the printing and posting of invoices on behalf of the client.
Not only was Deutsche Post.com able to meet their scalability demands by choosing the UC4 platform, it also meant that they could rationalise their architecture. The solution is 100 percent Java based on a Sun Solaris platform and integrating with BEA Weblogic. All communications are HTTP or FTP. The UC4 platform performs scheduling and the necessary process integration to automate as much of the process as possible.
Furthermore, the UC4 architecture simplified the whole process, enabling Deutsche Post.com to cut down the set up cost for new customers by at least 50 percent as well as reducing production execution time by between 25 and 40 percent. "We all think that the UC4 platform increases our productivity," said van der Zee.
Once the development team were up to speed with the UC4 environment, it was easy for them to build new modules and chains and, in the event of any errors, the output was immediately accessible through the UC4 client—it was then very easy to make changes and re-run the process.
"With the UC4 platform we found a product which combines intelligent mulit-platform scheduling, integrated communications with remote systems and easy to use monitoring facilities."
Eddy van der Zee, Project Manager
Deutsche Post.com, Germany
