Komatsu is a global manufacturer and distributor that provides essential earthmoving equipment, technologies and services to the construction, mining, energy, government, waste and quarry industries. In Australia, Komatsu manages its business operations on a legacy ERP system that could only process CSV files in batch jobs, which meant no access to real-time or push data.
Komatsu Australia needed to create a seamless digital experience allowing customers, partners, and internal teams to access the right data at the right time. Their objective was to become a data-driven business, which translated into the need for more advanced technology, offering APIs to forecast revenue, for example, and the capacity to share real-time data with their BI team.
All this required a powerful hybrid integration platform (link resides outside ibm.com)
Komatsu explored its options and chose IBM® webMethods as an easy-to-deploy integration platform as a service (iPaaS). The company now uses webMethods as the glue between critical systems, such as Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce and IBM AS/400 applications.
With webMethods B2B technology, Komatsu streamlined the procurement of parts from mining partners across Australia. With the B2B gateway, Komatsu can now integrate and manage trading partners, business processes and link related documents. Importantly, Komatsu gains a “single source of truth” for B2B transactions.
Despite their greatly expanded mandate, the Komatsu team was able to achieve this with no increase in head count, because webMethods would do all the heavy lifting.
With webMethods in place, the Komatsu team has recorded 30% faster development. The time to integrate a single file source into the new architecture has come down from five days to one.
The company’s new cloud environment is supported by a number of logic apps, which are made more efficient with webMethods. Now an email to an inbox can trigger an automated workflow complete with an alert—no expertise required. This elevates employees to citizen developers and reduces the need for a huge stack of business logic apps.
The intuitive webMethods interface and self-service integration empowers the teams to build their own tools. Other innovations include a customer service portal that enables customers to access records relating to operations, procurement, planning and purchase history. Using webMethods, 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.
Komatsu is a global manufacturer and distributor that provides essential earthmoving equipment, technologies and services to the construction, mining, energy, government, waste and quarry industries. Komatsu creates value through manufacturing and technology innovation to empower a sustainable future where people, businesses and our planet thrive together.
Komatsu (link resides outside ibm.com) Ltd. 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 over 60,000 employees in locations around the globe. In 1965, Komatsu Australia became a subsidiary and now employs more than 3,400 people across its Oceania operations.
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