A competitive energy provider automates its IT practices

The Problem.

A competitive energy supplier’s IT operations-monitoring team was overwhelmed with event response and unable to spend time on actual innovation and value-add initiatives. From top executives came a mandate that the company automate event response and achieve a 50% automated response within 12 months.

The WhitlockIS Solution.

Our team collaborated with the publicly traded company to define its most impactful automation flows to leverage with OpenText Operations Orchestration (OO), which automates simple tasks such as auto archiving, along with complex tasks such as disaster recovery planning. It provides the means to automate processes that include managing and provisioning a virtual infrastructure. Whitlock parsed flow development out to external and internal resources to gather requirements and build automation flows.

The Results.

Over three months, we developed 30 complex flows, which led to a 35% event automation attainment.

One specific flow, “Server Backup Failure Remediation,” previously had numerous manual steps and was automated to remediate the Netbackup agent and increase operational reliability.

The flows are triggered by OpenText Operations Bridge Manager (OBM) and used to create incidents in the company’s legacy Service Manager. Currently, those events create incidents in ServiceNow.

All flows leverage operational data from several systems to make decisions, including AD, RTSM, ServiceNow, NA, OEM, and other IT tools. Recently, OO was upgraded to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to address additional use cases, including UI interactions with customer-facing web applications, vendor tools with no API, and other web UI interfaces conducive to the robot-powered process automation system’s recording capabilities.