Business Goals

Lining, a utility and water management technology company, specializes in technical solutions for clean and wastewater lines and plants. The company is part of the Indutrade Group, operating in thirteen European countries. For more than 60 years, Lining's work has been based on reliability, efficiency, and innovation. Today Lining is the market leader in the industry with a market share of more than 50%.

As a modern service provider, Lining was searching for the integration platform that would help meet several business goals:

• To speed up the customer deployment of Lining products.
• To ensure smooth and flexible integration between Lining products to any customers' legacy, cloud, hybrid, or on-premises systems.
• To increase sales and expand and develop new offerings on top of automation and integration.
• To gain a competitive advantage by reducing installation time and expanding the offering.

In the end, Lining stopped its search and, in 2021, selected Frends as an integration vendor for its end-user projects.

"During our sales process, it is a usual occurrence when our customers ask if they can integrate Lining solution with their existing systems. And our answer is always "Yes," as this is now possible with the help of the Frends platform." Tero Auvinen, Head of Digi & Automation Department at Lining

Integration challenges

• Legacy and proprietary systems compatibility with modern/external best-of-breed technologies
• Back-end systems overload

Water supply, wastewater, and utility managers must always ensure smoothly-running operations 24/7. To meet these requirements, they must optimize how the service runs and gain process transparency. For this, they rely on service providers like Lining that have all the necessary tools.

Nevertheless, for most customers in the utility industry, it can be a costly challenge to integrate any new solutions to modernize their service operations and network information systems. And even if a new solution gets adopted, the clients are wary of bringing in any extra burden of additional back-end management and monitoring to their in-house team.

The other challenge lies in legacy and proprietary systems' falling behind in technological capability, meaning that there is a clear need for an integration solution that would lower the barrier for starting business transformation and modernization projects for any business with any technology landscape already in use.

"Integration capabilities are mandatory for a modern software service provider," says Tero Auvinen, Head of Digi & Automation Department at Lining.

Lining equips the industry with automated sensor metering solutions:

• to monitor water flow & consumption,

• reduce water losses,

• prevent system outbreaks and water leakages.

Combined with the Frends integration platform, Lining solutions have solved the immediate industry-specific problems, while Frends has removed all IT-related complexities.

Results

With Frends, Lining has succeeded:

1. To expand its offering into integration services in their business area.
2. To increase solution sales.
3. To lower the barriers to adopting the solution.
4. To speed up decision-making.

"During our sales process, it is a usual occurrence when our customers ask if they can integrate a Lining solution with their existing systems. And our answer is always "Yes," as this is now possible with the help of the Frends platform," shares Tero Auvinen.

Lining's first use-case with Frends was automation and integration of the AQUAVISIO measurement system and its AI (Artificial Intelligence) capabilities with the customer's third-party automation system. The combination of AI +System Integration is able to predict water consumption and send alerts when leakages occur to a client's system's interface.

Prediction model

The Lining team implemented this case using the Frends platform for integration and automation processes. This approach has benefitted the end-user by removing additional back-end management of the Lining's application.

Integration flow built with Frends

"The developers working on implementation were extremely pleased with Frends' ability to execute tasks and how easy-to-use the Frends' low-code approach is," concludes Tero Auvinen.

Lining and Frends technological partnership is twofold. On the one hand, it is a modern and cloud-based approach that has proved to allow the water management and utility industry to save time and resources and focus on their core business without needing to build and maintain the very new IT infrastructures. On the other hand, Frends has proved to be a reliable partner for a service provider like Lining in meeting their business goals.

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