Integration platform for Spirax Sarco

Spirax Sarco Engineering is a significant and successful leading force within the Manufacturing industry. Its continuing success can, in part, be put down to its global reach; quoting, for its Steam Engineering Business, 74 Operating Companies across 62 Countries around the world. Whilst this strategic approach can underpin the capability to operate a strong and winning formula in the market, it can come at a cost to the day to day operational management and maintenance of the systems that support that framework.

Manufacturing & Construction

Challenges

Each Operating Company historically has been able to function with a fair proportion of autonomy and again whilst this provides key flexibility especially for addressing regional and native idiosyncrasies this has led to the introduction of a complex architectural estate made up of multiple systems sometimes serving a purpose for single Operating Companies only.

Spirax initiated a global programme of work to standardise business processes and centralise business systems. A number of business applications were selected to support the Business globally with the core batch and real time integrations being delivered via new strategic integration platform.

Key Takeways

The need to introduce commonality across our global landscape from a functional and Business process perspective.

Reduce the amount of application administration and maintenance time to support such a complex architectural estate.

The need to operate as “one company” with shared Business Terms of Reference.

Centralising of our key data entities and ability to integrate core applications to share those data entities in a robust and repeatable manner.

Ability to scale system integrations to the needs and size of the Global Business whilst maintaining acceptable performance levels.

Solution

To enable Spirax Sarco to begin its journey on introducing a core integrated set of applications across the Business, BlueSoft were selected as the chosen strategic Integration Partner. A dedicated team of integration analysts, architects and developers as well as public cloud specialists were assembled to focus on this significant objective.

Whilst requirements were at the beginning fairly lean in their make-up, BlueSoft were able to take this level of detail and start working collaboratively with the Spirax project team to drill down deeper and emerge with suitable design proposals to achieve the requirements. The ability for the dedicated BlueSoft team to react to potential late requirements or changes in design were also proven during the lifecycle of the project phase.

Despite the challenges that virtual collaboration and time zone differences can bring, due to BlueSoft residing as a near shore Partner, both parties were able to successfully work together day to day through the use of a Spirax shared JIRA instance and Business Collaboration platforms, for example, Microsoft Teams and Sharepoint.

Due to the close working nature of the teams Spirax experienced a solid service from BlueSoft during the post Deployment Hypercare / Warranty period, with quality solutions proven by very few if any Live issues being reported against our integrations and a fast reaction time to any issues or queries being raised during this critical time for the Spirax Business.

BlueSoft team was critical to establish a new hybrid integration platform as a service, using a combination of commercial integration solutions supplemented by public cloud native services and CI/CD automation to support batch and real time integrations across the core business systems.