Control-M
Learn how Control-M provides advanced application and data workflow orchestration capabilities easily consumed by Dev, Ops and lines-of-business.
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Company Overview
Founded more than 40 years ago as an energy utility in Portugal, Energias de Portugal (EDP) has grown into a global energy company specializing in energy transition. Present in 29 markets, it provides electricity and natural gas to more than nine million customers. Throughout its history, the company has been committed to producing green energy. Currently, 74 percent of all energy it produces comes from renewable sources, with plans to be 100 percent green by 2030.
The Challenge
As a global company, EDP relies on a wide range of business services to drive innovation and provide support to customers worldwide. These services include energy production, distribution, and management. With customers around the world, the collection of data for each invoice and the subsequent production, printing, and shipping is a particularly complex process. Each invoice requires input from multiple systems and interfacing with multiple partners, including banking and financial partners, to gather details such as financial and billing information, usage data, and other customer-specific details.
Control-M can integrate with virtually any other system or application.
For years, EDP managed the data collection, production, printing, and shipping of millions of invoices per day with manual scripts. However, over time and with the increasing complexity of the business, the inherently fragile nature of scripting mission-critical applications and data workflows became too much to manage. When scripts or the upstream or downstream workflows failed, IT operations (ITOps) was forced to employ manual, labor-intensive methods to troubleshoot and resolve errors in real-time, often having to run only certain parts of the scripts while disabling others.
The time-sensitive and accuracy-dependent nature of customer invoices resulted in longer delivery times, as any changes to workflows were increasingly time-consuming, costly, and challenging. This made the shift to automation a necessity to ensure the timely and accurate delivery of critical customer services.
The Solution
The company needed to simplify, automate, and standardize the production of the invoicing process, ensuring that accurate invoices were created, printed, and shipped on time, every time. It chose Control-M, the market-leading application and data workflow orchestration platform from BMC, to rebuild the printing and shipping process.
Control-M runs hundreds of applications and covers nearly all of our business in EDP. If anyone from the Application Teams or Process Architecture Teams comes to us with an integration request or other challenge, Control-M can always offer a solution.
Control-M allowed EDP to eliminate the need for manual scripting and significantly streamline the operations. With Control-M’s advanced workflow monitoring, end-to-end visibility of all workflows, and error detection and remediation capabilities, the company was able to view all the jobs and events that made up the global invoice service from a single pane of glass. And if a problem was detected by Control-M, EDP could easily see the source, the impact on service delivery, and how long it had to resolve the situation.
EDP also leveraged Control-M to create a scheduling model that could be reused in other services. Now, other services use the printing and shipping workflows, which has improved efficiency, standardization, and optimization.
The Results
Control-M is a key enabler for EDP, empowering the company to drive innovation and deliver exceptional support to its customers around the world. As EDP adopted new technologies into its business, Control-M continuously evolved to integrate them into its workflows, ensuring the solution could accommodate the company’s changing needs. By expanding its usage of Control-M, the company was able to maintain the centralized, end-to-end visibility of all application and data workflows supporting its critical business services.
In just one year, Control-M reduced the number of incidents in application workflow execution by 46 percent. In addition, the EDP ITOps team has created a self-service catalog for application developers to access relevant services, giving them the autonomy to complete their tasks while reducing the number of requests that are forwarded to them by 36 percent. This has helped to alleviate the burden of repetitive tasks for the team so they can focus on more strategic initiatives.
EDP is taking full advantage of Control-M’s growing list of integrations. Because Control-M can integrate with almost every application or create new integrations through Application Integrator, the company can fulfill integration requests coming from application teams, improving collaboration and maximizing the benefits of Control-M’s orchestration framework.
Looking Ahead
EDP company has a long history with Control-M, using the solution to run the multitude of applications and data spanning nearly the entire organizational infrastructure and supporting the above-mentioned business services.
Control-M’s integrations continue to play an integral role in driving EDP’s business forward. File transfers account for 75 percent of all the company’s processes, and when integrated with other extract, transform, load (ETL) systems and several data hubs, are used to support complex data pipelines.
As EDP transitions to a multi-cloud environment—including Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud—its data pipelines are becoming increasingly complex. Control-M is facilitating the multi-cloud adoption by providing native support for all three providers’ storage, streamlining multi-cloud file transfers and data pipeline orchestration.
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