Author: Mark Hillary

When I recently visited IBA Group I was expecting to hear about their Cloud Computing solutions and some of their more recent developments in Machine Learning, but I was surprised to hear exactly how developed their Robotic Process Automation (RPA) expertise is today. I was surprised because their approach to RPA is not typical. They have experience of delivering real projects to real clients in multiple countries using the top 4 RPA software platforms.

Now contrast this to the typical RPA story in the media. Robo-bosses, robots taking over, and other mentions of robots replacing humans. When reading about RPA we usually read hype and grand claims of digital transformation, often from experts or IT companies with very little track record in this area. Yet IBA has been quietly developing expertise in all the major RPA platforms all over the world and there is no hype at all. They have just been getting on with the job.

RPA is now (almost) a $2bn a year marketplace and it’s growing fast. This area of business is only going to get more important as we move into 2019. HFS predicts that we are looking at $2.3bn revenue in RPA technologies in 2019 and this will grow to $4.3bn by 2022.

Traditionally HFS has been the least bullish of the analyst community. For a long time they criticised analysts such as Gartner for hyping the RPA market, but now even the HFS predictions look exciting. Gartner predicts that spending on RPA software is growing around 57% year on year, which is a phenomenal increase for any market, but what is really interesting is how all the analysts seem to be agreeing that RPA is no longer in the Hype Cycle and is now being accepted as a regular business process automation tool. Even the forward projections of Gartner to 2022 feature year-on-year growth of 41% – RPA has arrived.

When I arrived at IBA, I never expected to hear such a solid RPA success story – case study after case study of real RPA deliveries. I did a detailed interview with Vjacheslav Mikitjuk, director of Internet Technologies, that I intend to publish in the new year.

The RPA world is full of hype. HFS Research has been a vocal critic of the RPA hot air and fake news for the past few years, but even they now acknowledge that there are real solutions being delivered that are adding value all over the world. I witnessed this up close when I went to visit IBA Group and it was not even something that I had expected. They have kept their RPA expertise fairly quiet, but I’m hoping to change that in 2019 by telling the world what they have been doing.

To listen to the CX Files podcast featuring Andrei Lepeyev from IBA Group, click here

Author: Andrew Dvirnyk

As a partner to the businesses who choose IBA Group for SAP development and applications management, we take it upon ourselves to make your goals our goals. For that reason, in addition to developing SAP solutions that improve efficiencies, we also commit to helping you get the most of your SAP investment. And that includes, importantly, using applications management support to reduce costs across your enterprise.

After three decades in business and expertise in design, development, deployment, and maintenance, IBA Group is uniquely suited to provide support across all levels. For our US clients, we focus on Level 2 and Level 3 support because it allows you to get the most out of our expertise, and to save money on hiring, training, development, and consulting costs.

Technical Knowledge Meets Business Knowledge

For our clients, we bring our experience to life as a trusted partner. That means that, in addition to high level technical knowledge, we also bring our understanding of business needs and requirements, regulations and constraints.

When we develop solutions and deliver application management support, we take all these factors into account. Then, we develop solutions that are the right fit for your environment and your customers. This approach not only connects you to what you need cost effectively, it also saves you time and the consequences of failed attempts to build what you require, or use what you have productively.

How we Reduce Customer Cost on Level 2 and Level 3 SAP Support

Because we are SAP developers – elite, trusted SAP solutions and application management support providers – we save businesses money in multiple ways. Let’s start with how we help you get the most out of your internal resources.

By bringing in IBA Group as SAP developers, we save you the investment of lengthy, expensive training for your in-house IT Team. Your in-house team can comfortably provide Level 1 SAP Support for your organization, along with performing the other functions you need them to perform.

On the other hand, if you wanted to get Level 2 support in-house, you are suddenly looking at a significantly larger burden on your organizational structure, your budgets, and your timelines.

The Expense of Building In-House IT Teams for SAP Support

Simply put, most in-house IT Teams are not built to handle Level 2 and Level 3 SAP Support. So, if you were to try to assign this task to them, you would encounter any (or all) of the following scenarios. In the first scenario, you hire full-time SAP developers who bring the same level of experience and skill that we provide. That means investing in multiple high-level professionals, including their salaries, training, and benefits.

In the second scenario, you attempt to increase the skillset of your existing IT staff. In order to do that, you must make equally significant investments of both money and time in training these professionals to build the skills necessary to provide Level 2 and Level 3 SAP support. Of course, the first problem with this scenario is that even after that considerable investment in training, and the time spent waiting for your in-house team to require the baseline necessary skills, you still end up with a team that has no experience. After all that time and money, you are ultimately paying for your employees to learn on the job.

Furthermore, and we have encountered this many times in companies in the US and around the world, once you make that sizable investment in training, after you have committed time and money you cannot get back, there is no guarantee that the staff you trained will stay. In fact, turnover happens frequently, especially when your employees have been handed marketable skills that they can take somewhere else.

By partnering with us, you avoid cost and risk. And you benefit from our expertise, along with our proven efficiency and quality.

Architecture: Seeing the Whole Picture

That said, we respect in-house IT Teams. In fact, we see ourselves as partners with the developers and engineers you have on staff. The way we look at it, we each bring out the best in the other, which, ultimately, leads to the best outcomes for your organization.

Our SAP Gold Partner Certified developers work with the staff you have to create seamless delivery and seamless communication to you about what solutions we are deploying and how those solutions improve the overall ecosystem of your operation. Here, solutions architects are crucial to cost savings. In many situations, business users are unable to determine exactly what they need. You may understand the problems you face. Your IT Team may have a list of common complaints or errors. But you lack a clear path forward, or an understanding of what is possible from an SAP applications management point of view, to create improvements.

From our vantage point, we see the entire architecture, the whole picture. And we develop and deploy solutions appropriately to improve that picture.

Change Management

Part of how we improve that picture and continue to create savings and efficiencies for our clients, is through the change management process. Change management occurs when the business requires changes, following the first level of support. As developers who see the whole picture of needs and solutions, we understand where and when change needs to happen. We outline those changes in the Solutions Design Document and assign tasks appropriately for in-house and outsourced support.

Here, recommendations become key to keeping application management support consistent and reliable. Once we define the recommendations and create the Solutions Design Document, application management support is no longer dependent on your outsourcing partner or your existing internal staff.

As an organization, that gives you autonomy and reliability, in addition to your savings of cost and time.

Recommendations and Risk Reduction

So now, we are seeing the scope of savings and improvements that you get when you partner with SAP certified developers like IBA Group. In the spirit of trusted partnership, we caution all businesses, whether they choose to work with us or not, to include building recommendations into their engagements.

If there are no recommendations, you have no autonomy to choose another outsourcing partner down the line. You will find yourself needing to start all over again. You will waste time and money after making decisions to save both.

In our case, we never close out a project without providing recommendations. Since we promise to save you time and money and getting you the most out of your SAP investment, it would be out of sync with our commitments to you and our values as a business to walk away without giving you a sustainable path to follow.

We aim to reduce your risk now and in the future. With us and on your own. And to save you money and improve your operations along the way.

To learn more about SAP application management support from IBA Group and how to start getting more from your technology investments and in-house teams, contact us.

Photos by Jason Dent and Marcin Jozwiak on Unsplash

Author: Andrew Dvirnyk

We like to describe Appulse as a problem solver. Large enterprises face the challenge of legacy issues when their businesses run on mainframe. Simply put, in almost all organizations the person who wrote the code is no longer on the team. In fact, that person is usually long since retired! So the current development and engineering teams are left trying to make sense of pieced together one-off solutions and other attempts to keep things running. What adds to the problem is that there is little to no consideration for how to maintain systems over time or how to manage, collect, and store knowledge.

That means that every real fix for an operational problem on the mainframe requires a deep dive into the history of the system, including the application business logic and technical implementation. And that requires a significant investment of high-level engineering talent and time. How much time? It can take 3 – 5 years to really get inside and understand what makes the mainframe tick and understand the current (and historical) state of systems and applications enough to deliver reliable, sustainable solutions.

In that time, you have pulled some of your most talented developers from other projects that allow them to flex their creativity and create new, more efficient, and more effective solutions.

Certainly, the problem of problem solving for mainframe is clear. But what is the solution? And how can we apply different types of approaches effectively to deliver the support that enterprises need to keep running in ways that are smart, sustainable, and reliable?

Who Uses the Blackbox Approach?

We see the Blackbox approach most frequently in these older systems whose original developers and engineers are long gone. However, let’s be clear. We are not talking about antiquated enterprises, or inconsequential organizations. In fact, some of the biggest enterprises around the world are running on mainframes.

And those organizations, upon which so many other businesses and individuals rely, have lost any sense of what has been done with their applications. As our engineers often say, “The older they are, the more Blackbox they are.” So, what does that mean, why does it matter, and what can we do to fix things?

What is the Blackbox Approach?

What qualifies as a “big problem”? Things like program records issues and other problems that threaten system operability at its most basic levels. You might classify these as “triage level problems.” The problems that threaten the vitality of the system so much that they must be addressed and resolved immediately. When you apply a triage-style solution, though, you are not addressing the underlying issues that caused the system problem in the first place. Nor are you considering the level or type of maintenance that you need to apply to keep the fix going, and to prevent the issue (or similar issues) from arising again.

In this scenario, the Blackbox Approach to resolving operational problems in applications that run on mainframe is like an emergency room doctor’s response to a broken bone, as opposed to a primary care doctor’s response to overall health and wellness.

Then, it is like returning to the same emergency room doctor the next day with another (possibly related problem). However, the doctor has no access to your medical history. So, the doctor needs to start from the very beginning, without any information that would make it easier to solve your problems.

Blackbox Approach Limitations

As we know from that scenario, the Blackbox Approach certainly has its place. But it also has serious limitations when you consider overall application sustainability.

We see the first limitation when we look at who in your organization is responsible for resolving application operational issues and maintaining application health. Using the Blackbox Approach, when a newcomer comes to a project, that engineer or developer does not need to know every line of application code and every type of operational problem that can occur in order to start doing his/her job. Rather, that person can locate and fix the most difficult problems. This is not all bad, as we have noted. It allows you to provide an acceptable way to support an older system.

However, it does not provide a sustainable path, nor does it ever give you the opportunity to drill down to the root causes of issues in a way that will prevent the same or similar issues from arising. Or in a way that will allow you to create more seamless solutions that maximize the operability and the health of the system.

As we all know, acceptable in the moment is not the same as effective over time.

What is the Whitebox Approach?

The Whitebox Approach includes the following: learning, documenting, and sharing. Remember, we are dealing with complex systems. That means that you are looking at multiple applications and a variety of issues. In this context, as all developers know, you start to see patterns and gather knowledge. The Whitebox Approach allows us to pull from that stable of knowledge.

How Does the Whitebox Approach Resolve System Issues?

Based on that growing body of knowledge, we can add new solutions for specific issues. Once we have learned, and documented, we are able to make that information available to others who are working on the system.

This ability to share solutions helps to resolve some of those legacy issues that we associate with mainframe in general, and with the Blackbox Approach specifically.

Whitebox Approach Challenges

While it is obvious that older systems are not likely to use the Whitebox Approach, we also recognize that, even some of the newer systems are not set up for the Whitebox Approach. However, the younger the system, the more information we have about it, so the easier it is to apply the Whitebox Approach.

However, do remember, a young system does not mean a problem-free system. We have encountered three-year-old systems where all the documentation was lost. In that situation, we had to figure out the logic entirely on our own, with no guide and no record.

In cases like this, which you have likely run into in one way or another, most of your energy as a developer goes into the process of reverse engineering the problem to determine how and why it happened. Only after that sometimes grueling (and always time consuming) process, can you begin to take steps to finding a solution. Often, you find yourself building things back from the ground up.

New Code Takes Time and Money

One of the most important takeaways here is the unavoidable. New code takes time and money. Most organizations, the very large organizations included, simply cannot afford that. Appulse fills the gap. Customers expect a sustainable level of quality, service, and performance. We have designed Appulse to help make that a reality.

What we are doing with Appulse, is catching the problems related to the mainframe products and subsystems objects owned by application (such as stopped transaction, failed batch job, bad status of tablespace, etc.), not to the application code itself. Then, we are making a critical next step that benefits your system over its lifecycle and saves you time and money.

Through Appulse, we are noting and storing the lessons that we learn through the problem recognition and resolution process. Then, through Appulse, we are making it possible to apply those lessons to multiple scenarios. Lessons we learn in one industry can be applied to another, rather than remaining siloed.

Appulse Moves from Black Box Approach to White Box Approach

Initially, Appulse takes a Blackbox Approach in that it comes from the varied experiences of support engineers. We do not learn everything first. Rather, with Appulse, we deal with problems, collect them in a knowledge base, and document how we solve those problems. Then that knowledge base grows, making it easier to address problems next time.

Ultimately, Appulse functions as a Whitebox Approach because we build on that stored knowledge base. We operationalize our expertise by learning, documenting, sharing, and continuing to improve.

Project Overview

The project was implemented to meet the following challenges:

1. Design and implement a unified data warehouse based on the standard industrial model with a degree of customization up to 30 percent.
2. Implement the algorithms of data upload from the accounting systems of the bank and external sources to the corporate data warehouse in line with the methodology of managerial accounting. To provide a possibility of performing adjustments.
3. Implement the approaches of data cleansing and quality control, as well as business rule verification
4. Build theme–based data marts designed to analyze general ledger data, loan portfolio, managerial accounting, and performance of the network of self–service banking equipment
5. Implement a business glossary of banking terms
6. Develop more than 90 scheduled reports covering the tasks of management reporting and reporting to the parent company and regulators.

Solution

IBA is working as a part of the development team. The IBA responsibilities include requirement analysis; application design; database design, application development; unit, functional and system testing; quality assurance; and support.

The first ten stages of the project were finished on time with excellent references from the customer.

The eleventh stage, namely the enhancement of the application is currently underway.

Project Results

The application was deployed to production in line with the schedule. IBA received excellent references from the customer.

Business Challenge

The Customer requirement was to minimize the downtime of business applications and to enhance SLA compliance. The problem was that there was no single platform to organize the application support process. Due to inconsistent actions of the customer service, the downtime of applications (individual transactions) could have increased along with the discontent of business users.

In addition, it was necessary to provide a single source of knowledge to improve the quality of support and transfer knowledge to new employees. Unified knowledge of problem resolution history and architecture features was to be distributed among all stakeholders and not get lost.

SOLUTIONS HIGHLIGHTS

IBA Group has created a centralized platform for supporting various business applications running under z/OS. APPULSE monitors critical z/OS subsystems, including IMS, CICS, DB2, MQ, TWSz, and identifies the problem early on. Whereupon it notifies the responsible support engineers of such problem and automatically generates a ticket. The AI module offers a solution to the problem and predicts its success. You can run the solution, if it seems to be appropriate, directly from APPULSE. In the event of a new type of problem, the support engineer may address it directly from the program, thereby ensuring training of AI. Next time, APPULSE will offer this option to resolve problems of this or a similar type.

Results

Client reduced application downtime and ensured business continuity. A history of resolved problems accumulates, and a knowledge base is formed that is accessible to all stakeholders. Training for beginners is faster, leading to better and faster onboarding.

Advanced APPULSE interface, AI module and more efficient support processes make this job more attractive, so it has become easier for HR to fill vacancies.

Challenge

The customer aimed to test feasibility of a cognitive automation technology for its business processes. The pilot business process consisted in validation of the tax amount charged in a vendor contract. Tax rates vary for different groups of vendors and are defined in the customer’s database.

Process Requirements

1. Achieve overall business process accuracy of 98 percent
2. Reduce manual time spent on one process by 50 percent
3. Train and support customer’s team to build automation for an SAP case.

Project Overview

The project is aimed at the design, development, testing and support of the Approver Maintenance Application (AMA). The application is designed to streamline updates to the approval process for purchasing requisitions. AMA has been launched to provide an easy process to maintain data in our customer’s purchasing systems.

Solution

IBA is working as a part of the development team. The IBA responsibilities include requirement analysis; application design; database design, application development; unit, functional and system testing; quality assurance; and support.

The first ten stages of the project were finished on time with excellent references from the customer.

The eleventh stage, namely the enhancement of the application is currently underway.

Results

The application was deployed to production in line with the schedule. IBA received excellent references from the customer.

Project Overview

The goal of the project is to support a comprehensive assessment tool for DB2 product customers as well as enhance and develop the product itself. The product is designed to optimize efficiency of a DB2 database on z/OS.

Solution

The IBA activities include L2 Customer Support, L3 Change Team, and Test Team. Getting involved in the project more than six years ago, IBA Group developed strong partnership with client teams that are engaged in major product design and development. Presently, IBA is maintaining several major product releases.

Project Overview

IBA provides support for a number of customer applications including:

1. Extranet n-Tier B2B application designed to automate the development of distribution programs allowing our business partner to manage the growth in demand within a distribution channel. As a result, both internal and external users (customers) are able to utilize and process efficiently the data that are distributed between various sources.
   Internet n-Tier B2C application designed to provide warranty support to the users of our partner’s hardware.
2. Extranet B2B web application that supports warranty returns by OEMs, distributors and resellers (Return Material Authorization). The application is ultimately flexible and easily customizable to the needs of each specific user.
3. A number of intranet applications that perform a range of functions for more than 18,000 users worldwide. These are applications like company-wide employee directory, employee CADP (Contribution Assessment and Development Plan) tracking, hardware deployment tracking, and etc.

All extranet and internet applications are implemented using the MVC (Model Viewer Controller) model. The front-end of the systems is using JSP, Java Servlets, DHTML, and Struts technologies and is hosted on IBM WebSphere four server cluster. The business logic is implemented using the EJB. Data between different application tiers flow in XML format using IBM MQSeries (JMS) as transport. IBM DB2 UDB cluster is used as a data storage system. The system interacts with SAP R/3 as a back end. All intranet applications are built on Vignette Application Portal.