Challenge

Atlas Copco relies on roughly 1000 distinct software packages across their operations, spread across four business areas and multiple entity levels. Traditionally, whenever these systems needed to communicate, a single integration team handled the connection.

As the number of IT initiatives grew, this team became severely overbooked. Other departments had to wait long periods just to get their data connected, leading to delays in innovation and efficiency. The integration team also lacked the specific functional knowledge required to accurately translate data across highly specialized business domains. 

Atlas Copco realized this centralized approach was a bottleneck that prevented them from scaling efficiently, and they needed a completely different approach to handle integrations. When Kris Feys, a VP of IT at one of their business areas, returned after working as CIO of mateco, he knew that EDA could be an answer to their problems and reached out to us.

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Solution

Instead of relying on a single group to manage every integration, we are co-designing a platform based on Event-Driven Architecture together with the experts from Atlas Copco. As it grows, this model turns the departments into independent data producers and consumers, returning data ownership to the functional domain experts.

Of course, implementing EDA in an organization of this size takes time. But perhaps even more importantly, it means a significant cultural shift: it’s a completely different way of thinking about data. To get buy-in and build trust throughout the organization, we started the rollout with internal inspiration sessions. We then followed those up with small and specific use cases to prove the platform's value.

As we organized these initial workshops, we realized that the technical knowledge and data quality varied across the organization. Instead of implementing complex business events from day one, we started by focusing on capturing state events. We also avoid creating a company-wide data model, since that would reintroduce the dependencies we wanted to eliminate in the first place.

Thanks to this technology-agnostic and gradual approach, Atlas Copco’s experts get the time to build confidence. They can adopt the Event-Driven way of working at a comfortable pace, using the technologies they are familiar with, while keeping the overarching strategy on track. An approach that clearly paid off, with many teams actively working on new integrations as the platform grows alongside them.

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Impact

• The EDA platform supports 24 applications, with many more on the way.
• Development teams now have the autonomy to build and deploy new initiatives independently.
• Integrations take less time and contain fewer errors thanks to domain-specific knowledge.
• A technology-agnostic onboarding process allows any department to easily connect their tools.