Automated Control Tower cuts ticket creation time by 98%

The project story

1. 01Challenge

   Opening a single ticket took about five minutes of manual work and depended on teams in different shifts. This process kept the team busy with logging tasks before attending to the farm.

   SLC Agrícola's Control Tower relied on operators to monitor alerts, check criteria in spreadsheets, wait for each occurrence's deadline, and open tickets in ServiceNow. With farms spread across different time zones, expanding coverage demanded more monitoring effort and consistent application of business rules.

   The team needed to automate these steps so operators could focus on service and on contact with the farms.

2. 02Approach

   We built an event-driven integration on Confluent Cloud. A custom connector queries the Solinftec API in continuous cycles, interprets occurrences per piece of equipment, and applies rules that define the responsible sector and the escalation deadline, respecting each unit's local time.

   The flow separates the current equipment state, the event history, and the escalations bound for ServiceNow. When an active, eligible occurrence reaches its deadline, the integration automatically sends the ticket creation request. Terraform organizes the provisioning of the Kafka cluster, topics, connectors, and access permissions.

   The solution also handles communication failures, credential renewal, and inconsistencies in the source data. Alarm changes within the same operation preserve the occurrence start, avoiding an improper restart of the deadline count.

3. 03Result

   The main gain reported by SLC Agrícola was an approximate 98% reduction in operational time per ticket. The comparison goes from about five minutes in the manual flow to roughly five seconds in the automated creation, plus the integration's execution time. The estimate excludes the waiting period defined for each type of alert.

   The automation takes over rule checking and ticket creation in ServiceNow, letting the operator follow the ticket and focus on attending to the farm.

   In the comparison presented by the operations team, the automated routine opened 494 tickets in one day across the 13 farms evaluated. The manual process opened 299. The difference of 195 tickets represents a 65.2% increase in the volume logged.

   In the pilot with Pioneira and Parnaguá, the one-day comparison logged 49 tickets by the automation and 28 by the manual process, a 75% increase. All 49 tickets from the automated routine were opened by the service account.

   The delivery automates the application of escalation criteria and keeps an event trail for operational analysis. The results presented compare the automation with the manual operation and refer to the days evaluated.