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Case Studies
Bonfiglioli
Shifting hybrid integration into gear with the right iPaaS
Bonfiglioli and IBM
A successful company held back by outdated integration
Bonfiglioli had recently grown to be a billion-dollar company and was building on its reputation as a go-to provider of innovative, reliable products for use in a wide variety of industrial sectors. Like many manufacturers, the company wanted to shift its business model to include revenue-generating services, such as long-term warranties, repair, storage and IoT services. However, the company’s IT architecture wasn’t capable of handling such a shift.
“We had an old-fashioned integration layer,” said Fabio Zoboli, Integration Architect for Bonfiglioli. “It worked well enough, but it was slow and there were compatibility issues to address every time we added anything new. It simply wasn’t ready for cloud-native deployments, the creation of APIs or real-time data sharing with third parties—not to mention all the other capabilities we would need if we were to succeed in our digital transformation in a multicloud, multiuser environment.”
Bonfiglioli had already invested in cloud solutions, and its assets were stored in a mixture of on-prem, private cloud and public cloud services. The company needed an integration platform that could handle thousands of endpoints across on-prem and multicloud environments, create an API-driven ecosystem аnd enable centralized governance to put an end to shadow IT integrations. Zoboli found the solution in the IBM® webMethods integration platform as a service (iPaaS), an enterprise-grade platform that could effectively do it all—centralized/decentralized, low-code when needed, but heavyweight for IT.
A single platform to take on any integration challenge
Bonfiglioli uses webMethods iPaaS to unlock the power of integrating hybrid, multicloud and traditional applications, connecting data openly yet in a security-rich environment for a smarter approach to enterprise-wide connectivity. “Though our IT team is relatively small, webMethods is so capable it allows us to be completely independent,” says Zoboli. “It’s simple to use, and setup took just a couple of months. Now we can manage everything ourselves—including creating our own complex APIs in a matter of days.” By quickly creating APIs, Bonfiglioli can interact more easily with its customers to increase understanding, build relationships and accelerate cooperation.
“The new integration platform works well with our Salesforce, Microsoft 365 and other SaaS services,” says Zoboli. “And the webMethods microservices runtime can be deployed in cloud-native infrastructures, including Microsoft Azure, our strategic cloud platform. webMethods covers all our integration needs.”
Accelerating business time to value
Bonfiglioli also uses webMethods as an accelerator for internal processes and as an API gateway. “Because the platform is easily scalable, it just seems to grow with us,” Zoboli adds. By unifying customer data and touchpoints, the iPaaS enables seamless customer interactions. Bonfiglioli has already used this capability to build a new customer portal for order processing, fulfillment, tracking, purchase history visualization and more.
“As more and more of our production becomes IoT-enabled,” explains Zoboli, “we’re looking forward to integrations that will make our business more sustainable through predictive maintenance of plant and products, more efficient distribution and real-time integration. Our iPaaS allows us to integrate old and new data across multiple environments—this gives us the edge on our competition.”
Bonfiglioli employs APIs to decentralize internal collaboration, enabling branches and manufacturing plants to locally select solutions—for example, manufacturing execution systems and supervisor systems—and integrate them with the company’s core systems. These core systems include ERP and CRM, integrated through standard APIs developed and published in webMethods.
More integration yields higher productivity, faster innovation
“We’ve already created 135 new APIs in under three years, unified under a single platform,” says Zoboli. “We’ve also supported the integration need of a single sign-on for all our web portals, including e-commerce, aftersales, customer and IoT [portals] and our specialist gear-calculation software. The iPaaS enables us to manage user registration across every portal, using a drag-and-drop functionality in the back end, so our customers only need to register once for us to have all their details across all our systems.”
Bonfiglioli also replaced manual upgrade installations with single-click actions—even for patches, updates and new accelerators. That makes maintenance and governance simple and frees up resources for business-critical tasks.
Toward a more integrated future
As for the future, Zoboli sees an even greater role for webMethods. “We’re currently looking at monetizing APIs by selling them as a service, so customers can retrieve detailed, valuable information about their orders, shipping, IoT data, maintenance and more. And we’re working a lot on automation, helping our workforce to rethink internal processes and increase their productivity. webMethods is an enterprise-wide enabler here, powering new, stronger integrations with Salesforce and other systems in near real-time.” Bonfiglioli is also looking at empowering tech-savvy colleagues outside the IT team to become citizen integrators and satisfy their own automation needs. “There’s some very exciting stuff in the integration pipeline,” says Zoboli.
Founded in 1956, Bonfiglioli S.P.A. (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a leader in design, production and distribution of a full range of gearmotors, drive systems, planetary gearboxes and inverters. It offers customers in a wide variety of sectors—from construction to food and renewable energy—complete, efficient product solutions, including dedicated services, co-engineering and after-sales assistance. With 20 production sites around the world and employing around 4,700 people, Bonfiglioli prides itself on being a global family company.
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