KINGSPAN
Designing a secure tooling and data integration platform on Microsoft Azure
Sector: Construction, Wholesale building materials
Size: 10,001+ employees
Technology used: Microsoft Fabric and Power BI, Microsoft Azure, Smart AIM
Solution area: Data and AI solutions, Cloud infrastructure and security
Innovation that's reshaping construction
The construction industry is facing big changes and Kingspan, the global leader in high-performance insulation and building envelope solutions, is continuously evolving to stay ahead. Innovation is central to Kingspan’s business strategy. This encompasses advancement of materials, building systems and digital technologies to address issues such as climate change, circularity and the protection of the natural world. Instinct for innovation runs through each of Kingspan’s divisions and businesses globally, which spans over 22,000 people across 212 manufacturing sites in over 80 countries.
The challenge
Across Kingspan Group’s global organisation, more than 170 Building Information Modelling (BIM) business units were independently developing digital tools to support product configuration and design in the field. A performance analysis by the BIM division revealed significant duplication of effort, with between two and ten business units simultaneously building the same subset of digital tools to solve similar challenges. As a result, innovation was fragmented and heavily influenced by the individual skillsets and resources available within each division, leading to inconsistent approaches, higher development costs, and longer delivery times. Kingspan needed a way to reduce duplication, standardise development practices, and provide a secure, scalable foundation that would enable both internal teams and external partners to innovate more efficiently while tackling increasingly complex business requirements. Additionally, Kingspan required standardisation of secure Azure deployments and multiregion data integration to support product configuration tools across its global divisions. Kingspan engaged Spanish Point to design and build a cloudnative tools platform on Microsoft Azure.
The solution
Spanish Point designed and built DevLeo, a scalable tools platform that rapidly assesses, builds, deploys and manages web application tools for configuring or designing Kingspan products in the field. With DevLeo, Kingspan provides its partners and customers with a collection of pre-built building blocks, which include pre-developed intricate calculations that can be incorporated into their own applications.
Spanish Point delivered a cloud-ready foundation and guided Kingspan through workshops to define core requirements, ensuring compliance with industry standards. A unified, secure, and governed Azure foundation was essential, along with a standardised integration layer to connect digital systems and downstream ERP/CRM dependencies. The solution was designed with a unique combination of standard application and infrastructure components.
Spanish Point used Microsoft Azure DevOps to provide a modern Git based repository for all source code required to build and deploy an app and its underlying Azure infrastructure. Spanish Point made extensive use of automated testing and automated build and deployments through DevOps, setting up sophisticated environments for planning and recoding manual and automated integration test plans and execution.
Spanish Point deployed Smart AIM, its Microsoft Azure DevOps accelerator with prebuilt libraries and framework services. Specifically, the DevLeo platform leveraged the Smart AIM library infrastructure-as-code and DevOps pipeline templates for deploying each Tool or App hosted in Azure Services. These artifacts were used within Azure DevOps to ensure that the Azure infrastructure and environments for each Tool or App were deployed in a consistent way with approved best practice configurations.
The data integration strategy for DevLeo was guided by two desired outcomes: supporting divisions in connecting their ‘local’ systems, and enabling/driving the adoption of digital strategy capabilities. A key tenant of this strategy was the building of a data integration platform. The integration platform for DevLeo was built using Azure PaaS services. Cosmos DB supported multiregion write and API Management premium enabled multiregion deployment. Regional instantiation of services kept local processing intact. Core services included Azure Data Factory; Databricks, Data Lake, Cosmos DB, Microsoft Fabric and Power BI.
The result
DevLeo was successfully launched, giving Kingspan’s teams fast, secure access to approved Azure services, so developers could focus on building great tools instead of managing cloud setup. Accelerated by Spanish Point’s Smart AIM library, it ensured every solution is deployed with best-practice security, reliability, and scalability. Spanish Point’s Azure PaaS based approach for the integration platform demonstrated lower development costs (more out of the box PaaS, less custom code) and lower operational costs (elastic resources managed by Microsoft), focusing Kingspan’s efforts on functionality and business value.
DevLeo benefits over 170 business units worldwide, standardizing how product configuration tools are designed and deployed across Kingspan’s global estate.
Technical deep dive
The goal was to design a secure, governed, multiregion Azure platform with Smart AIM orchestration (IaC, and CI/CD), plus a modern data integration layer connecting digital systems and divisional ERP/CRM, exposing validated product/asset data for downstream channels and analytics.
Data integration and analytics
The integration platform was built with Azure Data Factory (ETL and orchestration), Databricks (transformation and lakehouse processing), Data Lake Storage Gen2 (scalable storage), Cosmos DB (distributed NoSQL), Microsoft Fabric and Power BI for analytics. The platform provided validated product and asset data to digital channels (e.g. websites via Adobe Experience Manager) and to Microsoft Fabric and Power BI for reporting. Master product data was a source of truth for downstream systems including ERP.
.png?h=917&iar=0&w=683)
