Challenge

MHC’s NorthStar document automation platform serves more than 1,000 customers across various industries, including financial services, healthcare, government, manufacturing, retail and more. As such, those customers operate in varied ERP environments, both on-premises and in the cloud. When MHC undertook the development of a cloud-based solution, that posed a number of challenges. “Our thinking was our cloud application could talk to their ERP cloud application and everybody would be happy,” explained Tom McMahon, Senior Architect, MHC NorthStar Platform. “As we got further along in the process, we realized a lot of our existing customers were going to want to move to our cloud platform, but they weren’t necessarily going to move their ERPs to the ERP equivalent. So, we needed a way to get access to their on-premises data.”

Solution

MHC recently completed a similar, although much smaller scale cloud project involving a printing solution where they built their own agent to access on-premises data. “Our first thought was we’ll just make an agent to get access to the databases,” McMahon said. “But when we started looking into the challenges involved compared to the relatively simple print agent, we started looking into other solutions.” The team began its due diligence and did a proof-of-concept with a vendor that returned unsatisfactory results. The team eventually came across the Progress® DataDirect® Hybrid Data Pipeline connectivity solution and saw promise in the product’s strong integration capabilities. “We decided to do a proof-of-concept on Hybrid Data Pipeline,” McMahon said. “It was straightforward to set up and get it up and running. It looked like it would address many requirements without a lot of work on our side to integrate into our system—and that’s when we decided to move forward with Progress.”

Results

Beginning with the deployment and now more than three years later, the team at MHC has full confidence in the decision to move forward with the Hybrid Data Pipeline solution. They were particularly pleased with the solution’s containerized cloud native architecture that simplified deployment.

“We were able to implement everything directly in our existing workflows and pipelines with minimal effort,” said David Huynh, DevOps Manager, MHC. “Additionally, the amount of documentation and recommendations provided by Progress made it easy to monitor the platform.”

The powerful UI of the Hybrid Data Pipeline solution is also providing several benefits to MHC.

“The UI allows us to manage the integration setup without a lot of development required on our side,” he said. “We just had to do a small amount of development to facilitate a couple of infrastructure types of issues.”

The capabilities of the UI allowed MHC’s professional services team to quickly become experts in working with the solution, streamlining the customer onboarding process.

“I was able to sit down with a couple of folks on the customer support and professional services team and get them set up without any formal training,” McMahon said. “It’s intuitive enough that they were able to get the hang of it and figure it out themselves—and now they are experts with it.”

Another Progress advantage is the Hybrid Data Pipeline support team.

“Whenever there is a problem, and there haven’t been many, the support folks at Progress have been great,” he said. “They provide immediate help, we don’t have to wait 24 hours to get an answer, the responses are comprehensive and meaningful.”

Moving forward, as MHC strives to bring the highest level of innovation to its NorthStar solution for its customers, enhancing it with artificial intelligence and other transformative technologies, the Hybrid Data Pipeline solution is a valuable part of NorthStar’s infrastructure, providing vital data connectivity solutions.

About MHC

MHC enables organizations to tackle digital transformation with speed and confidence, delivering solutions to automate the creation, capture, and distribution of documents and communications across core business processes. With a highly flexible, end-to-end intelligent document and payment automation platform, MHC enables business users to eliminate manual processes, enhance operational efficiency, and deepen critical stakeholder relationships, driving sustained growth and excellence.

For data connectivity solutions that can help you achieve your operational objectives, look no further than Progress DataDirect. Learn more.

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