GoAnywhere Seamlessly Integrates Xylem’s Multiple Systems

Industry: Water Technology

Xylem is a Fortune 1000 water technology company committed to "solving water" by creating innovative and smart technology solutions to meet the world's water, wastewater, and energy needs. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., Xylem’s 17,000 employees help communities in more than 150 countries become water secure.

GoAnywhere Meets Challenge of Updating Antiquated Processes

Brian Klink, Xylem’s Operations Process Manager, explained how GoAnywhere MFT has been in use at the company since 2011 to manage its secure file transfer needs. More recently, the solution was used to help integrate a few antiquated processes to deliver more reliability, better communications, and control around key business operations.

Xylem was using a custom, web-based Kanban system for real-time communication between internal buyers and external material supplies for complete visibility of their material requests as well as shipments.

The system was written for Xylem in 1999 and was running on an outdated server. While Xylem’s other applications and a SQL database were successfully migrated to new servers, one of the main components of the Kanban system had several obsolete controls and wasn’t compatible with the updated server. The integral functions of these controls provided the needed hourly status communication between buyers and sellers as well as multiple daily updates to their master data. These functions needed to be maintained as an essential part of the company’s business operations.

“Additionally, the app was quite unstable, with random, near bi-weekly crashes if our network activity was high,” noted Klink. A manual restart was required for each crash. “This created a major disruption since the automated email correspondence between our buyers and suppliers was severed with no “system-down” alert provided through the existing app.” Klink knew they needed a more reliable solution and turned to GoAnywhere, the secure file transfer solution they’d depended upon for the past decade at that point.

GoAnywhere Solves Xylem’s System Integration Problem

"Since 2011, we have created literally hundreds of workflow projects and schedules in GoAnywhere MFT,” said Klink. These projects range from simple daily reports and alerts to custom tools with complex automation and secure integration processes between the company’s internal systems, suppliers, and their SaaS vendors. “After working in the IT sector for over 30 years, I rarely use the word, “seamless,” noted Klink. “However, the integration between our ERP systems, manufacturing systems, and all our upstream and downstream applications and databases have never been more reliable than they are today.”

Klink found their current integration situation was a great time to put GoAnywhere’s capabilities to the test. “I knew that a typical MFT project could easily handle querying any database table on our network and email the results in an Excel attachment,” said Klink. “However, our internal and external users would not be pleased with getting data in that format. So, by using SQL tasks and a bit of ingenuity, the body of the email was formatted to what our users were accustomed to seeing for 23 years.

“Within two weeks after I had the application and database logic outlined, I replaced the entire mailer app with two GoAnywhere Workflow Projects set to run every hour in Workflow Scheduler. All the original functions are performed, but with more confidence now that that Scheduler is ‘in charge’ and if we have any connectivity issues or failed attempts, I’m notified via an email alert instead of causing a system crash. The process will simply try again in an hour, completely unattended.” Klink also noted their new process has been in place without a single failure since 2019.

“With GoAnywhere in our IT collection and backed by outstanding customer support, we have been able to replace many antiquated processes and build exciting new solutions for any upcoming challenges,” added Klink.

GoAnywhere MFT Helps Xylem Deliver Reliable Communications

What used to prove an unreliable, unstable process ripe for system crashes and dissatisfied buyers and sellers is now a seamless, unfailing, and automatic process seamlessly integrated in the organization’s daily business operations.

Xylem can deliver the water services and technology its customers expect with a process that is modern and works unattended for better productivity and efficiency.