SHV Energy
One of the world’s largest distributors of liquefied petroleum gas uses integration to gain speed and responsiveness, powering its move into new markets
Business goals
Founded in 1896 by eight Dutch coal wholesalers, SHV Energy has grown over the decades into a global organization with a complex technology ecosystem that spans multiple applications and solutions all over the world. The company operates in 20 countries, offering over 16 brands and employing more than 17,000 employees.
SHV Energy wanted to gain holistic visibility across its decentralized environment, and leverage its data to capitalize on new business opportunities faster, and also control costs. At an operational level, the company planned to launch global initiatives in areas such as procurement, HR, and Salesforce optimization, and needed to integrate those programs with the business applications of local operating units. Effectively, SHV Energy wanted a way to transform into a networked, yet decentralized, organization that could scale easily to meet new business needs.
Integration Challenges
Due to steady growth and an increasingly competitive marketplace, SHV Energy knew it needed to modernize its technology platforms. However, the company had a significant amount of valuable information stored in legacy applications across the world.
SHV Energy’s technology challenges included:
- Lack of operational visibility across countries and locales
- Time to onboard new customers could vary greatly based on location
- Maintaining decentralized technology on-premises was complex and impacting efficiency
- Connecting legacy and modern applications required lengthy development for each new integration
- No way to extract the business value from data housed in legacy systems
How Boomi Helped
With the assistance of Capgemini Netherlands, SHV Energy created an Integration Competence Center (ICC) structured around Boomi best practice recommendations and the Boomi Enterprise Platform. The Boomi Enterprise Platform helped the company to:
- Establish a solid foundation for easily onboarding global and local applications
- Increase the reliability, resilience, and agility of its integration infrastructure
- Scale easily by reusing proven integrations and integration patterns
- Avoid the unmanageable complexity of point-to-point integrations
- Move from traditional batch integrations to more near-real-time integration
- Put up-to-date information in the hands of customer service agents using systems such as Salesforce
SHV Energy also found the Boomi Enterprise Platform simple to use from a technical perspective, capable of executing complex integrations quickly, and easy to maintain.
Results
The Boomi Enterprise Platform allows SHV Energy to continually increase automation within its value chain by enabling systems to talk to each other. For example, the company now has five global applications, integrated with 30 different local applications across various regions. This makes its entire global IT environment, with its many components, easier to manage.
The Boomi Enterprise Platform, hosted with Boomi Managed Cloud Services on Microsoft Azure, improves:
- Cost efficiency
- In-house integration capability
- Individual network communication at the local level
- Time-to-market for new solutions
The speed and responsiveness that SHV Energy gains from the Boomi Enterprise Platform supports the company as it moves into new markets such BioLPG and solar panels.
