Bonfiglioli's iPaaS Transformation with webMethods.io
            

Founded in 1956, Bonfiglioli 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 around 4,700 people, it prides itself on being a global family company.

Business was good for Bonfiglioli – it had recently grown to be a billion-dollar company and was building on its reputation as a go-to company for innovative, reliable products for use in a wide variety of industrial sectors.

Like many manufacturers, the business wanted to shift into revenue-generating services such as long term warranties, repair, storage and IoT services. But the company’s IT architecture just wasn’t up to the job.

“We had an old-fashioned integration layer” said Fabio Zoboli, Bonfiglioli’s Integration Architect. “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 multi-cloud, multi-user environment.”

One platform to take on any integration challenge

Bonfiglioli, like many companies, had already invested in cloud solutions, and its assets were stored in a mixture of on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud services. They needed an integration platform which could handle thousands of end points across on-prem and multi-cloud, create an API-driven ecosystem, аnd enable centralized governance to put an end to shadow IT integrations and the chaos of connectivity. Looking for a platform that could effectively do it all (centralized/decentralized, low-code when needed, but heavyweight for IT) the search went on. Finally, Fabio found an enterprise-grade solution that caught his eye.

Software AG’s best-in-class webMethods.io iPaaS allows businesses like Bonfiglioli to punch above their weight, unlocking the power of integrated hybrid, multi-cloud and legacy applications and connecting data openly yet securely for a smarter approach to enterprise-wide connectivity.

“Our integration platform works well with our Salesforce, Microsoft 365 and other SaaS services,” says Fabio. “And Microservices Runtime can be deployed in cloud-native infrastructures including Microsoft Azure, our strategic cloud platform. webMethods.io covers all our integration needs”

Now, everything can be connected to drive innovation and excellence—which allow this independent challenger company to finally take on the big boys.

Accelerating business time to value

Though it wasn’t one of the company’s original objectives, webMethods.io acts as both an accelerator for Bonfiglioli’s internal processes and as an API gateway to revolutionize the ways it works with its partners. “Because the platform is easily scalable it just seems to grow with us,” Fabio 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.

By quickly creating APIs, Bonfiglioli can interact more easily with its customers to increase understanding, build up relationships and speed up cooperation. “As more and more of our production becomes IoT-enabled,” explains Fabio, “we’re looking forward to integrations which 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.”

APIs allow us to leverage a decentralized model of internal collaboration, where branches and plants can locally select solutions (e.g Manufacturing execution systems, supervisor system etc…) and integrate them with Bonfiglioli´s core systems such as ERP and CRM through standard APIs developed and published in webMethods.

Higher productivity, faster innovation.

In the pursuit of productivity, agility, and good governance there’s no doubt that Bonfiglioli have found the right integration platform for them.

Fabio explains: “Though our IT team is relatively small, webMethods.io is so capable it allows us to be completely independent. 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. We’ve already created 135 new APIs in under three years and—unified under a single platform—Business and IT are getting faster all the time!

“We have also supported the integration need of a single sign-on for all our web portals, including e-commerce, aftersales, customer, IoT and our specialist gear calculation software. Our Super iPaaS enables us to manage user registration across every portal, using a drag and drop functionality in the backend, so our customers only need to register once for us to have all their details across all our systems.”

And, instead of having to install upgrades manually—as was the case with the old integration layer—patches, updates, and new accelerators can be installed and enabled with a single click. That makes maintenance and governance simple and frees up resources for business-critical tasks.

Towards an even more integrated future

As for the future, Fabio sees an even greater role for webMethods.io. “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.io is an enterprise-wide enabler here, powering new, stronger integrations with Salesforce and other systems in near real-time.”

And it’s only going to get easier: Bonfiglioli is looking at empowering their tech-savvy colleagues outside the IT team to become citizen integrators and self serve on their own automation needs. “There’s some very exciting stuff in the integration pipeline,” says Fabio. “We can’t wait to see what’s next!”