Case Study

Reece’s Journey to Modernization Is Paved With SnapLogic’s Intelligent Integration

Reece Backstory

The Reece business began in Australia in 1920 when Harold Joseph Reece commenced selling hardware products from the back of his truck. Today, with more than 8,500 employees, Reece is a multinational, ASX top-listed organization with offices in Australia, New Zealand and the US.

The Challenge

Reece has a dedicated technical team responsible for building software for internal use and customers. Gabi Currin, who is Head of Business Systems, has been integral to Reece’s modernization journey.

For a large part of Reece’s 100-year-plus history, the company has relied on its single core system to do everything from payroll to finance and people experience. Over time, our strategy changed to find best of breed off the shelf systems for key functions, like HR, Finance and CRM. The Business Systems team was formed to evaluate and implement these key software applications.

“Reece began lifting key capabilities out of the core platform, moving onto Workday for its HRIS system, Oracle for its financials and Salesforce for its customer enablement and interaction capabilities,” Gabi says. “The company also made a deliberate choice to invest in cloud platforms, which allowed for the regular updating of features.”

While Reece’s modernization journey was taking off, a new challenge emerged: its systems weren’t communicating with each other. Data was locked within the confines of each system, making it difficult — if not, impossible — to glean the insights needed to successfully move the business forward.

The Solution

On a mission to remedy this application sprawl dilemma, approximately six years ago, Reece began assessing a number of different integration tools and iPaaS systems. The company became familiar with SnapLogic through its transformational project with Workday — its first massive cloud acquisition. The solutions consultant leading the project highly recommended SnapLogic, so Reece did its due diligence and added it to its list of potential solutions.

After performing an in-depth proof of concept with two systems, SnapLogic emerged as the clear winner thanks primarily to its ease of use and strong UI visualizations.

“With SnapLogic, you can very clearly see a pipeline of the flow of data and the way it will be transformed through the process in a very visual and easy-to-understand way,” says Gabi. “In addition, the out of the box connectors for key systems like Workday and ServiceNow, can make setting up those initial integrations very quick and simple.”

When Reece implemented SnapLogic roughly six years ago, having it go live with Workday, Gabi recalls that setup was a breeze.

“Within six months, we were able to have a completely new HCM up and running. I think that’s a very fast implementation to be honest,” Gabi adds.

“SnapLogic provided comprehensive training to a dozen people on Reece’s technical team at the time. Then, as new team members joined the Reece family, they were able to do the training online, getting support from the team, as necessary. However, most people tend to pick up SnapLogic rather quickly and easily.

We had a big agenda of integrations in those 6 months, including new integrations from Workday to and from our payroll systems, Active Directory, Service Now, job boards and background check platforms, and we would not have been able to complete all of those in time by handcrafting integrations.”

Business Results

Today, Reece is running about 60 different integrations between all of its different platforms.

With SnapLogic having a local team in place with the opening of its premier Australian office earlier this year, Gabi says the relationship is stronger than ever. Even more, thanks to SnapLogic, Reece’s overall time savings have been huge.

“SnapLogic was up and running in half the time it would’ve taken us if we were building the integrations ourselves and with half the people. If we were building it from scratch, we would’ve needed a team of 10 people. With SnapLogic, we only needed a team of five working on the integration. And by developing certain pipes, we are able to reuse them in other integrations, which saves us heaps of time as well,” Gabi adds.

“We have extended SnapLogic across other platforms, like Finance. We have approximately 10,000 invoices that come in every day to Reece and are processed by Snaplogic. We also have real-time integrations using Ultra, continuously running pipelines. The transactions processed by the platform are large and varied. So having a reliable platform, at the core of it, is really important to us.”

Thanks to SnapLogic’s reliable and easy-to-use powerhouse platform and attentive local customer support team, Gabi is very hopeful for the future.

“The opportunities we see with SnapLogic are endless since we’re constantly connecting things to each other,” she says.

“Our appetite for data has grown enormously as a business. And our expectations of everything being connected have also grown exponentially. The ability to share data seamlessly between different systems is a huge advantage for us.”