Apergy (Dover Articial Lift) Continuous Data Integrations with Jitterbit

Dover Artificial Lift (DAL) is headquartered in Houston and serves the oil and gas industry with parts for oil and gas wells and other machinery used in energy production. DAL is part of Dover Corporation, a diversified global manufacturer with annual revenues of approximately $7 billion, delivering innovative equipment and components, specialty systems and support services through four major operating segments: Energy, Engineered Systems, Fluids, and Refrigeration & Food Equipment.

In the oil and gas industry, customers don’t come to you, you go to customers. That means that field service agents load their trucks with parts and go on what’s called a “milk run” to visit customers and evaluate their equipment needs. Until recently, DAL field service agents were mostly doing manual data entry for the orders they got on these milk runs. They would load up their trucks with parts, visit the customer to determine what was needed, then come back and fill out paper order forms to record the transactions.

The paper process meant that the sales cycle could take a few weeks to complete between the order and fulfillment. It also sometimes introduced errors, meaning that customers occasionally got the wrong parts. To help the sales process move faster and improve data accuracy, DAL decided to move to electronic field service, using LiquidFrameworks mobile field operations software. The company set an ambitious goal for the sales cycle to close within a week.

DAL uses Oracle ERP as its back-office applications for Finance and Operations. Reporting systems, integrations, Salesforce, and all the other aspects of the business need data from Oracle. After deciding to adopt LiquidFrameworks (LFW), it became apparent that DAL would need to build a two-way automated integration to be able to realize the full potentials of LFW mobile app. LiquidFrameworks recommended Jitterbit, which looked like a good fit for the project’s budget and timeframe. Some of the other integration platforms that DAL looked at started in the six-figure range and would require a whole team of developers to implement and maintain. In contrast, the IT team would be able to manage Jitterbit on its own. Other integration solutions were also slow to respond during the sales process, while fast responses from Jitterbit kept the sales cycle moving along.

Jitterbit’s built-in Salesforce Wizard got DAL up and running with its LiquidFrameworks integration within weeks, not months. Having the Wizard available allowed non-technical users to connect to Salesforce and get operations running easily. Because DAL utilized an agile strategy, there were frequent changes to the Salesforce platform setup. It was important for DAL to have an integration platform that it could rely on to keep Salesforce integrations up to date. Without the established Salesforce connections through Jitterbit, DAL would have felt the need to keep a closer eye on its Salesforce integrations and manually fix anything that went wrong.

Although there had been some concern about the technical component of the integration project between LiquidFrameworks, Salesforce, and Oracle ERP at first, Jitterbit quickly resolved those technical concerns and created stable, working connections. The bigger challenge with the integration turned out to be helping a team of field service reps who were accustomed to doing business on paper adjust to the new reality of working on mobile devices. At the end, the new process has been embraced by all, thanks in part to reliable and timely data integration.

Since implementing LiquidFrameworks, DAL has brought Jitterbit into several additional projects, increasing its usage of the system 100%. One team member is the Jitterbit admin and basically works on Jitterbit every day, enhancing or building new interfaces.

One Jitterbit integration reads data from QuickBase and pushes it into Oracle. Another extracts data from Oracle and posts it as XML to DAL’s EDI partners. Unlike the Salesforce integration, which the Wizard made easy, the QuickBase integration was more technical at the start. But once the team found the right ODBC driver for QuickBase and got a little help from Jitterbit, they were was able to build the connection independently.

The DAL IT department can count on Jitterbit to get integration projects done with the right combination of speed, stability and agility, which provides a real return on investment.

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