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Case Study

Inspyrus Platform on Oracle Cloud for National Instruments

Customer: National Instruments

Industry:  Computer Software

Business Pain: National Instruments empowers customers with off-the-shelf software such as NI LabVIEW and modular cost-effective hardware and sells to a broad base of more than 30,000 different companies worldwide. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has operations in more than 40 countries. National Instruments (NI) is a multi-national organization with operates around the globe with each region providing critical Accounts Payable (AP) and other financial services through tools like Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS).  Working with central oversight, each region has been faced with diverse and inconsistent AP processes despite their oversight processes.  To better facilitate their AP processes and to gain consistency and accuracy across all global regions, NI commissioned a project led by TekStream to build and implement an Oracle Cloud architecture to deploy a new AP solution, Inspyrus, designed to unify NI’s AP operations under a single standardized process. In an effort to reduce internal IT cost to maintain, manage, and monitor the Inspyrus platform resources, NI also engaged TekStream’s Managed Service Partner (MSP) program for these critical services. In addition, engaged in TekStream’s Premium Support program for tailored Inspyrus application solution support.

Key Pain Points:

  • 45 organizations with 6 worldwide service centers requiring 24/7 monitoring of services and platforms
  • Internal skillsets lacking on Inspyrus software and OCI cloud platform
  • Cost of ongoing maintenance of on-premise hardware
  • Cost of internal IT staffing and staff training
  • Ensuring SOC and ISO compliance
  • Cost of ongoing maintenance of on-premise OS/Software
  • Visibility on system uptime metrics and issue tracking
  • Metrics on hardware resources consumed to optimize sizing needs

How we fixed it: TekStream worked with NI’s resources to implement the Inspyrus platform within a secure private structure on an Oracle Cloud instance.  The environment was then integrated with multiple cloud and on-premise components with extensive security controls to provide a seamless AP management solution for EBS.   As part of the project, the environment and related process controls were evaluated and configured to ensure that they are supporting SOC II verification.

TekStream implemented the Inspyrus solution to address each area of NI’s operational, processes, and security concerns to provide consistency and high visibility of each regional AP process area.  The net result of the provided solution greatly improves ingestion, circulation and payment automation while also providing an analytics component that establishes extensive metrics on each area of the process so that bottlenecks are quickly identified and addressed.  The solution was deployed in a phased systematic approach with key processing center deployment each quarter.  At full deployment, 45 worldwide organizations and 6 regional processing centers are utilizing a consistent and highly effective AP solution.

With many customers, NI also needed assistance in managing the operations of the solution.  By engaging with TekStream, NI was able to redirect critical resources to other operational tasks while TekStream provides cost-effective long term Managed Services of their AP solution under a SOC II compliant operations maintaining the system environments and provide technical assistance to the NI team as necessary. Key Managed Service activities include:

  • Monitoring and triage of the delivered solution 24hours a day 7 days a week
  • Patch management: Operating Systems, database, and application
  • Issue remediation and Root Cause Analysis (RCA)
  • Event Notification services
  • Quarterly reports for system issues, critical system uptime, and resource metrics
  • Daily external vulnerability scanning to ensure protection from outside attacks
  • Monthly internal-elevated vulnerability scanning to ensure deep system protection and security threats
  • Synthetic HTTP monitoring of critical URLs

TekStream was able to provide the needed global, next-generation, cloud-based AP processing tool that provided a single, modern user experience that incorporated best-in-class OCR, processing, workflow, and reporting capabilities to National Instruments.  By providing a Cloud-based solution and Managed Services to ensure the operational and ongoing excellence of the delivered environments, TekStream worked closely with the NI business and technical teams to drive a complete solution that allows NI to focus on their business rather than having to divert resources to ensure the provided solution maintains efficient operations.  The solution also ensures that the AP process works with multiple Oracle ERP systems in a seamless and integrated fashion.  All of this was accomplished with Inspyrus deployed on Oracle Cloud provided NI with the flexibility and capabilities they needed to streamline their AP processes, reduce overall costs, and turn AP into a strategic asset with TekStream’s MSP to ensure the consistent operation across all global regions.

Technology Involved: Inspyrus, Oracle Cloud