Fuel and convenience retailer, Ampol has partnered with cloud-based integration platform as a service (iPaaS), Boomi to use the Boomi AtomSphere Platform to drive agility and speed to market for critical business projects.
Utilising Boomi, Ampol can deliver new system integration services 70% faster and at 30% of the previous cost, providing a secure way of connecting customer, supplier and SaaS platforms to its self-hosted IT applications.
Ampol has overhauled its digital capabilities by leveraging a service-based architecture to connect myriad systems and data across the supply chain to better service its business and retail customers. A multi-year strategy will involve major cloud migration and replacement of legacy, on-premises systems with SaaS applications, in addition to a unified integration solution to connect new digital investments and provide a single conduit of data sets.
As a business running hundreds of technology solutions for daily workflows, retail operations and customer experience initiatives, the retailer needed something to connect the data being generated, according to Ampol head of technology, Lindsay Hoare.
“We also needed to orchestrate it across the organisation. This became especially important once we started bringing new digital assets to the business,” he said.
Ampol implemented Boomi to replace 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 analysed to inform business decisions – for example, fuel prices, stock levels, and shipping activities,” Hoare said.
“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,” Hoare said.
“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.
“In another example, the ongoing 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.”