BDO are a leading Professional Services firm providing tax, audit and advisory services to some of world’s biggest brands. They operate within a highly regulated industry and have been leading the way on transitioning to a product-led and cloud-first approach within the Professional Services industry.
The challenge
BDO were replacing their legacy, on-premises, Oracle PeopleSoft ERP system with several cloud platforms – including Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Workday, alongside bespoke internal applications.
In total, there were over 190 point-to-point integrations with PeopleSoft, creating a complex web of interconnected applications, which was inflexible and expensive to maintain, requiring specialist knowledge and laborious regression testing in order to make changes.
In addition, many of the integrations were batch driven, meaning that downstream systems had to wait hours, sometimes days, for updates to flow through, which led to slower actions and less accurate data.
The solution
FSP led a joint team of FSP and BDO engineers in the delivery of a cloud-based Integration Platform built on Microsoft Azure serverless services – including API Management, Logic Apps, Functions and Service Bus, in order to provide a resilient and elastically scalable platform on an economical consumption-based pricing plan.
The project followed an agile delivery methodology, in line with FSP’s DevOps principles, ensuring the team was able to react to the complex and changing landscape of integration requirements from multiple vendors, as well as ensuring BDO engineers were upskilled and able to fully support the application once it went live.
The Benefits
The new solution gave BDO:
- Full visibility of the status of any of their key integrations
- Confidence that business critical transactions would be executed correctly
- Scale to deal with an ever-increasing number of integrations and messages
- Full integration with their service tooling, allowing them visibility of any system issues
- Reduced time to integrate with future systems
- The ability to replace components of their system without disrupting the overall system