ISS Tackles Massive System Integration with CAS AG
As a general contractor, ISS Germany manages, operates, and maintains buildings and technical facilities for major clients. To ensure that the German subsidiary of the Danish service provider ISS A/S can deliver its services smoothly, the service provider’s systems must communicate seamlessly and in real time with its customers’ heterogeneous and complex IT environments. This is a Herculean task for system integrators, and thanks to CAS AG, ISS is ultimately able to handle this massive system integration project.
December 2022
ISS Tackles Massive System Integration with CAS AG
As a general contractor, ISS Germany manages, operates, and maintains buildings and technical facilities for major clients. To ensure that the German subsidiary of the Danish service provider ISS A/S can deliver its services smoothly, the service provider’s systems must communicate seamlessly and in real time with its customers’ heterogeneous and complex IT environments. This is a Herculean task for system integrators, and thanks to CAS AG, ISS is ultimately able to handle this massive system integration project.
December 2022
The Challenge of System Integration
Only by integrating the numerous different systems on the client side with its own software applications is ISS able to deploy its employees in a synergistic manner and thus make its clients’ outsourcing arrangements economically viable. If it is time to mow the lawn on a property and the customer simultaneously reports damage to the fence at the same property, ISS can assign both tasks together to its employees.
Before ISS, as an expert in integrated facility management, took on the world’s largest contract from a telecommunications group in July 2019, the company, drawing on a select group of the best integration specialists, tackled the monumental task of connecting its IT landscape to that of its new major client. For key tasks in the project, ISS relied on the expertise of CAS AG, which not only has outstanding experience in integrating a wide variety of IBM and SAP systems, but also offers, with CAS Realtime Data Hub (CAS RDH), a proprietary, user-friendly, scalable, and cost-effective solution for distributing and delivering data in real time. CAS RDH very effectively prevents redundant data storage and, consequently, overloading of the core systems.
As part of this massive project, ISS also succeeded, with the help of CAS AG, in connecting 20 different systems through approximately 300 system integrations. While this major telecommunications client primarily relies on SAP solutions for facility management and real estate, ISS works with a wide range of different applications built around the IBM Tririga facility management system.
A particularly important aspect of the project is that there is absolutely no downtime for the integration solutions—in part because ISS also receives alerts from a wide variety of systems operated by the major client, such as those triggered by sensors in buildings. This allows ISS technicians to respond immediately if, for example, water damage occurs in one of the customer’s approximately 9,000 locations.
To ensure that data always flows smoothly in the middleware—which is primarily built using IBM solutions—CAS AG uses its own solution, CAS MON, for ISS. This solution efficiently monitors the data flow along the target processes, creates transparency across system landscapes, and helps quickly identify the cause in the event of a data error. Integration monitoring checks for each individual data run to ensure that the data record or message has actually been received.
Holger Lindner, Head of Integration at ISS, is very satisfied with the collaboration with CAS AG: “The consultants at CAS AG work in an agile manner; they find solutions and are doers.” Thanks to their expertise in system integration, they are the right partner for the project. “CAS AG has extensive expertise in both SAP and IBM solutions,” adds Lindner. Even though the facility management industry was still relatively new to the consultants at CAS AG, they were able to familiarize themselves with the specific processes very quickly.
According to Holger Lindner, the distribution mechanisms of the CAS Realtime DataHub (CAS RDH) middleware solution are particularly important. ISS uses CAS RDH to homogenize master data. Master data—such as information about buildings and employees—plays a central role in the project.
However, at the start of the project, 20 percent of this data was not yet in a structured format and had to be standardized first in order to derive the key economic benefit from automating the data flow. Very often, a data record must be exported to different systems. ISS was able to automate this process using CAS RDH. The solution is also ideal for connecting micro-entrepreneurs who work for ISS, along with all their master data.
Based on its positive experience to date, ISS has decided to carry out additional projects with CAS AG. ISS is currently working with consultants to implement an automated and highly integrated solution for resource planning. This solution enables ISS to deploy radio technicians in a way that is optimized in terms of time and location, while taking into account constraints such as absences and qualifications.
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