Challenge

In 2003, Splunk was founded in San Francisco to help customers simplify the task of collecting and managing large volumes of information. Following initial success, the company expanded. But as it grew, its finance and IT teams were overwhelmed and struggled to scale operations. Part of the problem was Splunk’s payment platform: it required excessive customization, had increasing costs, and inconveniently redirected customers to external payment vendors. Compounding the issue, manual tasks such as refund processes were inefficient and often created reconciliation discrepancies. Auto-renewal for customers was also manual, causing additional work for the sales team and potentially costing the company opportunities.

In 2019, Splunk was moving to a new cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. During this transition, Splunk decided to overhaul its payment processing systems.

“We selected SAP S/4HANA as our new ERP and wanted a digital payment processing solution that would integrate with it,” said Vinit Vishal, head of finance engineering at Splunk.

Solution

Splunk decided to consolidate its payment processing solutions with Stripe Payments and the Stripe for SAP Digital Payments app. The company appreciated Stripe’s scalability, strong reputation, and integration with SAP. An added benefit was that many of its customers already used Stripe, making it a trusted solution. But Splunk wasn’t just looking to procure a solution from a vendor—it wanted to partner with Stripe and SAP to fine-tune its platform.

Splunk integrated its new SAP S/4HANA system with Stripe using the Stripe for SAP Digital Payments Add-On (DPA) app. The Stripe for SAP DPA app provided Splunk with much of its desired functionality out of the box and supported an easy pathway for additional functionality. Splunk, Stripe, and SAP worked together to meet Splunk’s specific requirements, which included seamless integration and automation.
“We collaborated with Stripe to identify deficiencies, gaps, and features to add,” said Vishal.

That collaboration resulted in the creation of an online portal that allows Splunk’s customers to enter credit card data, which is then tokenized by Stripe, but is never directly available in Splunk’s systems.

Today, Splunk uses the Stripe API to automatically pull key information into a special general ledger in SAP. The company has also automated refund processing, significantly reducing manual work.

Results

By consolidating solutions with Stripe, Splunk reduced payment processing complexity and can now integrate directly with its new ERP. The result is a robust payment processing platform that scales with Splunk’s growth.

Developers reduce development timelines by 75%

Stripe’s integration into SAP has provided Splunk with improved speed, reliability, and information accuracy—saving its IT team considerable time. “We embedded Stripe into our Splunk portal and reduced our custom development for credit card integration timelines by 75%, because the solution mostly works out of the box and requires minimal customization,” said Vishal. “By embedding the payment page within our site, we also unified our environment and improved the user experience.”

IT teams enhance efficiency with integrated solutions

Leveraging Stripe APIs directly from SAP has helped Splunk accelerate the development and customization processes. “By allowing access to Stripe APIs through SAP, Stripe makes it easy to add additional capabilities and customize our solution,” said Vishal.

Simplifying operations and boosting accuracy

The automation provided by Stripe has saved time and minimized errors across several teams, including customer service, finance, IT, and sales. For example, automating credit card refund processes has simplified operations for the finance team.

“We reduced manual reliance on our teams,” said Vishal.

Stripe also enabled Splunk’s developers to quickly automate the process of pulling key information into a special general ledger in SAP, resulting in notable improvements in accuracy and timeliness.