Air Products uses SMS to prevent on-site incidents

Not all incidents are created equal. Some can wait until the next day for the IT squad to take care of. Some happen in the wee hours of the morning and require immediate attention. When you’re managing a 75 year old S&P 500 company with 22,000 employees grossing tens of millions of dollars per year, every incident counts. That’s the case for Air Products, an industry standard supplier of gasses and chemicals. An IT issue left unaddressed could cost them untold sums of money, and affect their customers.

Going From On-Premise to Cloud Hosted

Air Products has a legacy to protect, but that doesn’t mean they’re using old legacy hardware. When they needed to upgrade their telecommunications platform they had been using for 20 years, they chose Twilio.

Air Products needed a simple solution: incident management via SMS alerts. Their on premise provider couldn’t provide the flexibility they needed. Air Products wanted a hosted, cloud-based solution that could easily integrate with ServiceNow, the frontend PaaS software they use to manage SMS scheduling, logic, and escalation.

Platform changes like this don’t happen very often at Air Products. They kept their previous SMS vendor for over 20 years. Migrating the contacts and data accumulated over 75 years of business is no small task. Bruce Hendershot, Solutions Architect at Air Products, needed the telecommunications solution he chose to be easily adopted and molded to Air Products’ tried and true architecture.

Getting Critical Alerts At The Right Time

“We didn’t want to buy functionality we didn’t need,” said Hendershot. “Twilio was really straight forward. We got the numbers set up easily.” In January of 2015, Air Product implemented Twilio SMS powered incident management for their entire organization. Now, when a severe incident alert comes through their system, it gets flagged and triggers an immediate SMS alert to the right IT specialists, engineers, and stakeholders. The team members who are alerted have the option to reply via SMS to say “I got this issue, I’m working on it.” Once they reply, the incident ticket is automatically updated to reflect who’s owning the issue. The whole process happens in an instant, because there are only seconds to spare when it comes to incidents, especially at Air Products’ scale.

Hendershot and his team are relieved to finally have an SMS provider that fits their unique needs. “Being able to generate SMS, at the end of the day, wasn’t something we wanted to make a project in itself. [Twilio] made that piece of it no effort at all. We’ve had no issues and no complaints.”

Now Air Products can concentrate on their next 75 successful years knowing that their SMS provider can scale alongside their business.