The API deployed by MuleSoft is now reused by more than 10 MIT departments and what took 6 weeks to build, has now saved more than 1 year of duplicate development effort. Discover how MuleSoft’s management with MIT is a representation of Epidata’s mission. (*)

Epidata is present in several countries around the world and has extensive experience in developing innovative projects with corporate clients. For these reasons, the partnership with MuleSoft seeks to jointly drive innovation in workspaces and academic sectors, providing clients with state-of-the-art solutions that allow them to adapt to the challenges of security, scalability and technological transformation of work in the software era. Within this framework, the management of MuleSoft with MIT is an example of how Epidata reflects its mission through the activity of its partners.

Mulesoft with MIT: context

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) prides itself on its long history of innovation. A few years back they realized a lot of university processes like registering for housing, paying tuition, and checking grades were not innovative at all.

When MIT began exploring how to translate these services into new web and mobile channels and decentralize access from Information Services & Technology, they feared opening their financial and student systems to outside requests would introduce significant risk. That’s where they realized they needed an API strategy.

Information Services & Technology now provides a reusable set of APIs available to students, faculty, staff, and affiliates through their self-service MIT Developer Connection portal. The idea is to open up MIT’s institutional data in a way that’s easily consumable yet governed – fostering the next wave of innovation out of MIT’s Cambridge campus and beyond.

Introduction of MIT

MIT set out on an ambitious 2020 IT vision to transform IT and deliver a world-class student experience. However, MIT’s Central IT team found that the constraints of meeting “keep the lights on” IT meant that it did not have the capacity to meet new initiatives such as a “cloud-first” systems modernization initiative.

The Goal

In order to deliver the 2020 vision given these resource constraints, MIT’s Information Services & Technology team sought to first transform itself, from a delivery channel for the 11,000+ students and 1,000+ faculty that rely on its services, to an enabler that would allow university departments and IT teams to self-serve. The goal was to expand Information Services & Technology delivery capacity by distributing IT delivery capability to other teams through building a set of reusable APIs.

MuleSoft’s Intervention

Through partnering with MuleSoft and adopting MuleSoft’s API-led connectivity approach, MIT has built out a microservices architecture exposing 8 public APIs (such as Courses, Classrooms, and People). The reuse of the APIs has driven significant productivity increases. For example, the People API provides basic directory information about students, staff, and MIT affiliates. This API is now reused by more than 10 MIT departments and what took 6 weeks to build, has now saved more than 1 year of duplicate development effort. This has freed up the IT team to move resources from ‘Keep the lights on IT’ to delivering on the innovative new projects that comprise the Project 2020 vision.

* Source: adapted from Mulesoft (2022): https://mulesoftpartners.bloomfire.com/ 

About Epidata

Global privately-owned company specialized in innovation outsourcing, dedicated to providing software development and software design services, application modernization, RPA, machine learning and Big Data, among others. Its solutions transform businesses, optimizing operations and co-creating better digital experiences for customers and employees.

Epidata has alliances with leading innovation and knowledge companies such as Microsoft, GitLab, Mulesoft, Salesforce, Oracle, MariaDB, Red Hat and HelpSystems. These partnerships help other companies to stay current.

Epidata operates in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay and the United States (San Francisco, California), where it has a track record of successful support to multinational corporations such as Stanford Research Institute International, JP Morgan, Tenaris, Turner, Telecom, HSBC, Monsanto, Walmart, Asana, among others.

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Discover how MuleSoft’s management with Coca-Cola is a representation of Epidata’s mission. (*)

Within the framework of our search for innovative proposals, and in a constant evolution that seeks to incorporate the best technologies, Epidata sees MuleSOft as a strategic partner to continue its mission of facilitating innovation for companies. In line with innovation, in addition to doing integrations, Epidata is part of a select team of partners that assist in developing projects that evolve this tool. 

Context about MuleSoft and Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola strived to deliver innovative customer-focused initiatives. Yet, as IT faced more digital projects, its disjointed architecture made accessing data difficult. They relied on legacy data centers that were challenging to access and connect. To streamline this process, they adopted a cloud-first strategy. IT has focused on self-service access, providing integration templates that its 250+ bottlers can use. This focus has enabled mobile applications for sales teams and a “Smart” Cooler leveraging real-time data. IT has improved the customer experience while cutting delivery timelines from months to weeks.

Introduction

Coca-Cola, selling 1.9 billion global servings a day, wanted to stay at the forefront of innovation both for its retail customers and individual consumers. As demands from the business to roll out new digital initiatives continued to climb, IT found itself struggling to provide access to the necessary data for different lines of business to use for new projects. As more initiatives were planned, IT realized their current architecture was rooted in disjointed data and handcuffed them, causing project backlog to grow, pushing out development deadlines.

The team decided to close out their data centers and adopt a cloud-first strategy, with the hope of introducing self-service and reusable assets to establish a more future-state architecture. They decided on MuleSoft to enable an API-led approach. This has allowed them to decouple their data sources while standardizing on reusable templates that their 250+ bottlers could leverage and customize. They’ve since enabled lines of businesses and bottlers to self-serve and build good portions of projects on their own – thus eliminating bottlenecks by federating the work to where the expertise exists.

IT is now delivering projects routinely in ¼ of the time (12 weeks to 3 weeks) and can onramp a new developer in just 3 weeks (what previously took 2.5 months). The sales team is now equipped with a mobile application that acts as a single point of real-time data to effectively manage their customer relationships. They’ve also developed new IoT projects around creating smart coolers which provide analytics to rapidly enrich and combine structured and unstructured data sets, thus providing better customer experience and analyzing consumer behavior to promote new products and services. All of this is built on MuleSoft’s unified runtime for Hybrid Integrations and APIs on one single platform.

About Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola, one of the world’s most iconic brands ever, maintains its same mission 125 years later: to “open happiness.” Today there are 1.9 billion servings of Coca-Cola Company products served every day. Distributing this overwhelming amount of product requires the company to rely on an ecosystem of bottlers and distributors, with over 250 of them operating on 5 continents. Now, Coca-Cola has evolved from the glass bottled beverage it once was to a global brand, with consumers engaging across multiple digital channels which are changing rapidly as technology evolves.

• In order to engage with consumers and keep up with demands, Coca-Cola needed to digitize its process and create new products to interact with customers.
• They needed better data and analytics around customer behavior, for example, IoT enabled coolers to track customer usage, digital dispensers, personalization through digital interaction (Freestyle machines), etc.
• Coca-Cola has embarked on their digital journey to engage customers and connect with them in ways they never have before.

Desired Outcomes

• Engaging retail customers through informed sales teams – needed a single application platform for the sales team to manage effective customer relationship management.
• Launch mobile and dispenser-level digital experiences for consumers.
• Provide analytics to rapidly enrich and combine structured and unstructured data sets of customers, consumers and business processes to provide better customer experience, and analyze consumer behavior to promote new products, promotions and services.

Challenges

• Disjointed data impacted the ability of sales to be responsive to and thrill their retail customers.
• T was unable to keep up with business demand to roll out digital initiatives – mobile, digital dispensers, and IoT within coolers and the fleet.
• Increasing demand for all front-office applications to be mobile-ready.
• The Coca-Cola Company has over 250 bottling partners worldwide, the largest,
• Coca-Cola Bottling Investment Group (BIG) employs over 100,000 people. IT struggled to meet the demands of the business, and rolling out these digital initiatives proved even more difficult with various regional demands.

Solution

1. Driving digital transformation internally across central organization: The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) selected MuleSoft as their unified platform for SOA, SaaS and API development. By building reusable common services, APIs and templates, they saw a speed increase of 2X.
2. 2014 ($100K ARR)
3. Increasing sales productivity with bottlers: Bottling Investment Group (BIG) was the first bottling group to adopt MuleSoft to increase sales productivity. Connecting various backend systems to Salesforce gives the field access to all customer’s (retailers) information on their mobile devices. Bottlers are achieving 2-4X increased speed by going from Webmethods on-prem to MuleSoft Cloud due to reuse and lower maintenance requirements. Piloted first Freestyle machine with connectivity – customer preferences are monitored and uploaded to machines to make the experience more personal.
4. 2015 ($1M ARR)
5. Internal operational effectiveness
6. Connecting Concur, and Salesforce to other internal systems. Also got CloudHub ready for all of Coca-Cola with reusable APIs/templates. Mule in Action:

Story 1: When a Coca-Cola sales associate walks into a retailer to negotiate a quarterly or monthly buy, all the information they need in terms of current inventory, pricing offers, historical buying patterns – anything they need to have an informed discussion with the customer – is readily available on the associates mobile phone or tablet. This is a Coca-Cola Bottler’s digital transformation for improving internal operations.

Story 2: At any dispensing location, when a customer walks up to a Freestyle machine they can choose from hundreds of different dispense options, creating a personal selection, blended in real-time. The customer can interact with the machine based on their previous consumption habits and Coca-Cola learns more about the customer.

Results

1. IT:
2. 4x faster; Coca-Cola is delivering projects routinely in 3 weeks rather than 12 weeks.
3. 3.3x faster to onramp new developers; what used to take 2.5 months, now takes 3 weeks with MuleSoft.
4. Almost a year’s worth of man-days saved (336 days) on managing applications; what used to take 18 days to support a new application, now takes 4 days with MuleSoft.
5. Business:
6. Deliver hybrid integration and APIs on one unified iPaaS: Anypoint Platform
7. Launch Common Service Interface Program to build reusable and consistent APIs to be leveraged by the global bottler community.

* Source: adapted from Mulesoft (2022): https://mulesoftpartners.bloomfire.com/ 

About Epidata

Global privately-owned company specialized in innovation outsourcing, dedicated to providing software development and software design services, application modernization, RPA, machine learning and Big Data, among others. Its solutions transform businesses, optimizing operations and co-creating better digital experiences for customers and employees.

Epidata has alliances with leading innovation and knowledge companies such as Microsoft, GitLab, Mulesoft, Salesforce, Oracle, MariaDB, Red Hat and HelpSystems. These partnerships help other companies to stay current.

Epidata operates in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay and the United States (San Francisco, California), where it has a track record of successful support to multinational corporations such as Stanford Research Institute International, JP Morgan, Tenaris, Turner, Telecom, HSBC, Monsanto, Walmart, Asana, among others.

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Discover how Asana Software management with Zoom is a representation of Epidata’s mission.

Today, Zoom saves an estimated 667 workdays per year with Asana features like forms, comments, templates, and more. That’s more than two years of typical 40-hour workweeks.

Within the framework of our search for innovative proposals, and in a constant evolution that seeks to incorporate the best technologies, Epidata sees Asana as a new strategic partner to continue its mission of facilitating innovation for companies.

Zoom’s new needs

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone from businesses to prime ministers signed up for a Zoom account. The leading communications provider connects millions of companies, friends, and families with video, voice, chat, and content sharing tools. And for businesses, in particular, video conferencing plays a starring role when they can’t meet with customers in person and teams can’t physically work side by side.

Zoom grew from just over 2400 employees in January 2020 to more than 5700 global employees as of June 2021 and the Business Services & IT department keeps them all connected. Gregory Daniels, Senior Manager for Technology Program Management, leads a team that focuses on IT project and program management. They oversee systems changes and deployments such as Zoom’s Okta rollout and the companywide Bring Your Own Device program. These global initiatives, with budgets in the millions of dollars, affect just about everyone at the company.

Greg has also worked to develop Zoom’s project management culture, but when he joined, teams were struggling to collaborate in a mix of spreadsheets, emails, and work management platforms. The mishmash just wasn’t working:

• Engineering and development teams used Jira, but marketing and sales teams didn’t, making visibility into upcoming feature releases difficult.
• Some teams fielded work requests from all directions, which made it difficult to scope and prioritize inbound projects.
• Status updates for executives were presented in a slide deck that teams manually updated in a tedious process.

Zoom’s workforce needed a more effective way to communicate as the company scaled up.

“As Zoom grew, we wanted a standard view of everything going on so we could prioritize work and make business decisions. We needed visibility, accountability, consistency in how work gets done, and knowledge sharing across teams.”, says Ariel Chavan, Head of Security Product and Program Management.

A solution to bridge technical and business teams

Greg and his IT colleagues began to evaluate work management platforms. A top priority was to unite Zoom’s technical and business teams to eliminate those last-minute launch scrambles. They needed a platform that had a Jira integration, and that was flexible enough to accommodate different workflows from different departments.

It was also important that individuals were able to start working on the tool without setup help from IT. In fact, a couple hundred employees at Zoom were already using Asana Software on their own. This, along with its flexibility, native Jira integration, and market-leading position, helped the IT team choose Asana as Zoom’s standard platform.

Rollout: teaching people to manage projects the Zoom way

IT rolled out Asana Software to five departments initially, and as managers brought projects into the platform, their teammates followed. More and more groups came on board as they saw the value of centralizing work, with one easy-to-share link to an Asana project that contains everything. IT also achieved leadership buy-in by moving monthly business reviews into Asana.

Greg says, “Once we made Asana official, the pent-up demand for a work management tool spilled over and we saw many more people using it over time.” Zoom’s time savings from working in Asana grew 200% year over year as adoption increased.

Greg’s team used the Asana Software rollout to teach people general organizational skills and the “Zoom way” of getting things done. “Asana is our classroom to help people learn a new way to manage projects,” he says. “We use it to teach fundamental project management skills and how to work in a repeatable, scalable way to achieve results.”

How technical and non-technical teams work together in Asana Software

Departments across Zoom use Asana Software as a source of truth.

• The engineering-business connection. Engineering teams manage day-to-day tasks in Jira, synced to Asana, so they don’t need to update marketing on every little release. “It has completely unscrambled the scramble for us,” says Greg.
• Marketing. The globally distributed marketing team uses Asana to plan campaigns and events, as well as to manage inbound requests from other teams at Zoom.
• Business Services & IT. IT uses Asana for global rollouts and systems changes, such as the Bring Your Own Device program, which achieved 90%-plus enrollment. “Asana made change management easy,” Greg says. “We could track every tiny subtask needed to help Zoom employees understand the program. There was too much going on for a spreadsheet to be effective.”
• Security. The Security team uses Asana Software to keep their projects up-to-date in real-time, so everyone can see their status. This is vital for the team’s large technical implementations and enterprise-wide rollouts, which can involve up to 20 collaborators and many more stakeholders. The team uses Portfolios to organize continuous large-scale initiatives and nested Portfolios for projects within them.

“When you’re moving this fast as an organization, it’s important to be on the same page and have a centralized tool to hold people accountable.”, states Marc Seitz, Senior Security Program Manager, Threat and Vulnerability Management.

Teams rely on a standard set of Asana Software features but use them flexibly to match their processes.

Projects are the source of truth, and Project Overviews provide context about goals, scope, time, and cost, so that nobody needs to ask the project manager.

Portfolios group projects by their program, clarify team workloads and bandwidth, and let managers monitor status in one view.

Integrations such as Jira Cloud connect technical and business teams. The Zoom integration lets meeting attendees take notes in an Asana task within a Zoom meeting. The Zapier integration helps automate steps in workflows, while the Google Drive integration connects files to the projects they belong to.

Forms help teams collect inbound requests from internal sources in one channel. For example, the content creation team in Sales Ops Enablement collects all information upfront in their standard Asana Form. Greg says, “It was process enforcement from day one. They share a form link, receive a secure request, scope, and provide a deadline estimate.”.

They can quickly iterate on their process by changing fields in the Asana form. Zoom employees submit nearly 900 forms per month, and the efficiencies created save the company an estimated 335 days of work per year.

Templates provide a jumping-off point for new projects, saving time and ensuring no steps are forgotten. “If I’m using an Asana template,” says Greg, “an hour of project planning becomes just fifteen or twenty minutes. An hour-long kickoff meeting gets cut in half. The time savings are substantial.”

Zoom saves 667 workdays per year

Today, Zoom saves an estimated 667 workdays per year with Asana features like forms, comments, templates, and more. That’s more than two years of typical 40-hour workweeks.

Some teams have ditched manual executive slide deck updates, instead of using Portfolios to give leaders a 30,000-foot view of all initiatives. It’s also easy to spot when groups are working on similar projects, so they can consolidate work and rally their efforts.

The Anatomy of Work Index found that this duplication is common, and knowledge workers are spending 13% of their time on work that’s already been completed. The issue becomes more likely when an employee uses many apps to get things done. But for Zoom, a central home for projects shines a light on redundancies.

When all schedules, tasks, and communications are in one place, remote collaboration is easier.

Organization and discipline help companies scale

As Zoom’s project management capabilities continue to grow, more groups like Greg’s are emerging around the company. They continue to champion and innovate on the Zoom way to get things done, helping everyone execute quickly and at scale.

When employees work together in Asana Software, Zoom closes the distance between its teams—just as their products help close the distance between colleagues, loved ones, and even prime ministers.

(*) Source: adapted from Asana (2022).  https://asana.com/case-study/zoom#app-language 

About Epidata

Global privately-owned company specialized in innovation outsourcing, dedicated to providing software development and software design services, application modernization, RPA, machine learning and Big Data, among others. Its solutions transform businesses, optimizing operations and co-creating better digital experiences for customers and employees.

Epidata has alliances with leading innovation and knowledge companies such as Microsoft, GitLab, Mulesoft, Salesforce, Oracle, MariaDB, Red Hat and HelpSystems. These partnerships help other companies to stay current.

Epidata operates in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay and the United States (San Francisco, California), where it has a track record of successful support to multinational corporations such as Stanford Research Institute International, JP Morgan, Tenaris, Turner, Telecom, HSBC, Monsanto, Walmart, Asana, among others.

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En PedidosYa nos caracterizamos por la rapidez de nuestro servicio, enfocado en el cliente y en su satisfacción: nuestro principal objetivo. Como una de las principales app de logística que existen actualmente en Latinoamérica, recibimos miles de transacciones por minuto provenientes de todos los países donde nos encontramos, lo que requiere, para su éxito, de procesos sólidos, ágiles y eficaces. 

Teniendo en cuenta esto, vimos que nuestro proceso diario de contabilización de tarjetas de crédito nos llevaba mucho tiempo; algunos errores (totalmente evitables) generaban duplicidad de tareas en el área de finanzas.

Luego de un exhaustivo proceso discovery, backup de tareas y más de 10 procesos productivos por automatizar, decidimos que nuestro socio indicado para afrontar esta transformación era Epidata, quienes tras dos meses de assessment de arquitectura —servicio de relevamiento y evaluación de nuestro sistema de software— conocieron y corroboraron nuestros datos y capacidad existente, y analizaron e identificaron riesgos potenciales en nuestra arquitectura y procesos. Finalmente, lograron diseñar un plan de trabajo en conjunto, donde la solución que compone el sistema SAP, Excel y otras herramientas utilizadas por nuestros colaboradores se integraría a través de Robotic Process Automation (RPA) con el software de HelpSystems.

Los especialistas de Epidata han logrado estandarizar el proceso con un alto grado de calidad al momento de ejecutar el workflow, la bajada de informe (conectándose a Prisma), el armado de batch, y la subida y verificación a SAP para contabilizar —diariamente— el cobro de tarjetas de crédito y la generación de reports. Entre los beneficios alcanzados están: 

• Aumentar la velocidad del procesamiento de datos.
• Liberar al colaborador en otra cadena productiva del negocio.
• Minimizar los errores al momento de cargar manualmente los datos. 
• Mejorar el control y la identificación de las oportunidades de mejora.

Luego de tres meses de desarrollo e implementación, la solución ya está funcionando exitosamente. La automatización redujo significativamente los tiempos del proceso, lo que llevaba 12 horas hoy nos consume sólo 2, permitiendo de esta forma cubrir con calidad y eficiencia el crecimiento exponencial respecto a la demanda de nuestros servicios en toda Latinoamérica. 

¿Vas a dejar sin automatizar tu proceso repetitivo? Escribinos a info@epidata.net