Ampol is leveraging the Boomi AtomSphere platform to drive agility and speed to market for critical business projects, Boomi announces.
By using the platform, Boomi claims that Ampol can deliver new system integration services 70% faster and at 30% of the previous cost, providing a secure and scalable way of connecting customer, supplier, and SaaS platforms to its self-hosted IT applications.
Boomi says it allowed Ampol IT to deliver many projects, including smaller ones that previously would not have had viable cases.
To become adaptable to market conditions and customer demands, Ampol has overhauled its digital capabilities. The company is leveraging a service-based architecture to connect myriad systems and data across the supply chain.
Ampol also needed a unified integration solution to connect these new digital investments and provide a single conduit of data sets across all technologies and processes.
“Running hundreds of technology solutions crucial to daily workflows, retail operations, and customer experience initiatives—we needed something in the middle to connect the data being generated,” says 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.”
Ampol implemented Boomi to replace what Hoare calls a “spaghetti junction,” featuring hundreds of on-premises, point-to-point integrations.
“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,” explains Hoare.
“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 is reliable or protected, or if there could be missing pieces,” adds Hoare.
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, it allows 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 is 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,” says Hoare.
One of Ampol’s first Boomi projects was to implement an integrated bulk fuel ordering process for its commercial fuel customers. This process has already been reused over 60 times.
“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,” recalls Hoare.
“In another example, the ongoing administration and logistics behind rebranding 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,” Hoare says. “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.”
Ampol also capitalised Boomi to onboard vendors from various EDI gateways onto a single EDI provider for its retail network.
Additional outcomes include:
Simplified compliance and reporting: Various Australian state governments require fuel retailers to report changes within prescribed timeframes. Using Boomi, Ampol set up automated processes to relay near-real-time data from the field into a specialist pricing modelling engine to allow compliance to the price reporting regimes.
Decommissioned on-premises legacy middleware platform: Ampol could decommission its legacy on-premises middleware platform—another step in its journey to shift all workloads from on-premises data centres to the cloud. Another benefit was productivity gains for its IT staff, who no longer are consumed with coding and supporting complex legacy integrations.
Ampol leveraged the services of Sydney-based IT services provider, Anatas, which provided Ampol with specialist integration consulting expertise, resources, and architectural guidance.
“Bad data causes outages in the integration landscape, which quickly leads to broader business disruption as departments, teams, and customers struggle with the consequences of outdated or missing information,” says Anatas chief executive officer Jason Frost. “As Ampol continues to diversify its services, Boomi provides an incredibly flexible and scalable software glue that structures systems and data to stand the test of time and deliver the right information wherever it is needed.”
“Ampol is engrained in Australia’s consumer and business landscape, making connected data a critical factor in building intelligence across such a large-scale operation,” claims Boomi director solutions consulting APJ David Irecki.
“Through its pragmatic investments—and adopting the Boomi AtomSphere Platform to steer its digital transformation—Ampol has engineered a digital landscape that drives integrated experiences for Australian consumers and companies globally.”
Irecki concludes: “From managing shipping activities, stock levels, and supply right through to fuel prices and its fuel card initiative, Ampol can rely on Boomi’s low-code integration to keep its systems and data connected.”
