Komatsu

Komatsu was founded in 1921 in a mining village in Japan and is now one of the world’s largest suppliers of utility, construction and mining equipment. The company has 60,000+ employees and locations around the globe. In 1965, Komatsu Australia became a subsidiary and now employs more than 3,400 people across its Oceania operations.

In 2014, Komatsu Australia was booming. Its expansive and diverse business model, which includes equipment sales, remanufacturing, maintenance, after-market and financing, was experiencing exponential growth. A good problem to have.

But cracks were emerging: The company’s complex business operations built on one legacy ERP system could only process CSV files in batch jobs, which meant no access to real-time or push data. With an infrastructure no longer fit for purpose, IT couldn’t keep up with the business or customer demands.

Bringing data into the light

Like its machinery, Komatsu Australia proved its resourcefulness. The subsidiary knew it needed the right middleware to share data with third parties. webMethods became its integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS), acting as the glue between critical systems, such as Microsoft Dynamics^®, Salesforce^® and legacy AS400 applications.

Adding webMethods Trading Networks, Komatsu streamlined parts ordering from mining partners across Australia. With the B2B gateway, Komatsu can integrate and manage trading partners, manage business processes and link related documents. Importantly, Komatsu gains a “single source of truth” for B2B transactions.

Despite their hugely expanded mandate, the Komatsu team was able to achieve this with zero increase to head count—webMethods was doing all the heavy lifting.

Becoming a data-driven business

Today’s customers demand a seamless digital experience. And, with the emerging ecosystem economy, it was clear the company’s digital strategy needed a refresh. The objective was set to become a data-driven business, explained Kevin Li, Integration Solution Architect: “For us this translated into the need for more advanced technology, offering APIs to forecast revenue, for example, and the capacity to feed a hungry BI team with real-time data,” Li said.

All this required a powerful hybrid integration platform to manage applications in the cloud. So Komatsu explored its options. Software AG’s webMethods.io proved to be an easy-to-deploy iPaaS to integrate applications in the cloud. It had an intuitive customization of Eclipse™ (compared to other vendors) and strong workflows. And with webMethods came Software AG’s Professional Services to reduce risks with an architecture assessment.

Lower TCO, faster innovation

Now with webMethods in place, the Komatsu team is “moving mountains” and fast. The team has recorded 30% faster development. And they’ve gone from needing five days to integrate one file source into the new architecture down to only one!

The team is building its own tools, thanks to an intuitive webMethods interface and self-service integration. The company’s new cloud environment is supported by a number of logic apps, but webMethods.io can hold its own there too. Using Software AG apps, an email to an inbox can trigger an automated workflow complete with alert—no expertise required. This elevates employees to “citizen developers” and reduces the need for a huge stack of business logic apps.

In other innovations, a customer service portal will soon empower customers to access records relating to operations, procurement, planning and purchase history. The portal pools data from back-end credit checks, ERP order histories and distribution centers to offer a real-time visualization of a customer’s digital footprint. This innovation has been deployed using the webMethods for API management.

In the meantime, work goes on to move 70% of on-prem interfaces to the webMethods.io platform within a year. Given the rate at which new interfaces are being built, this goal seems highly realistic.

Building on success

With webMethods for integration, along with Software AG Professional Services, a committed account executive and customer success manager, Komatsu Australia feels in the best of hands. “Software AG supports us proactively with any and every requirement both within and outside our existing engagement,” Li said. And as the company moves in the direction of machine intelligence, they’ve requested a demo of Cumulocity IoT.

“People think this project is purely about internal IT leadership,” Li said. “But there’s no denying the role Software AG technology has played in raising our profile within Komatsu. Software AG has open, independent software that works seamlessly together and with others. Watch this space!”