Boliden and Nodinite

Boliden and the IT-department  

Boliden is a metal industry with a turnover of 50 billion Swedish crowns with mines and smelters, mainly in Sweden and Finland, delivering and selling copper, zinc, lead, gold, and silver worldwide.  

Boliden’s integration landscape:  

• 40 connected large application  
• 400 integration flows  
• 400 000 messages a day  

Nodinite at Boliden  

Boliden’s systems integrations platform has business rules and business logic. When something goes wrong with the message flow, it’s 99% of the times because of the business logic or business ruling not accepting the data. By introducing Nodinite in steps (agile implementation) to the business side, they could see that it wasn’t a problem with the system integrations solution but the data itself.     

Shared Responsibility  

Boliden’s ICC makes a clear distinction between the data in the integration platform that they own and the business’s data. The business knows the data structure by adding the Nodinite layer when the data is rejected or accepted in the integration bus. They can decide whose responsibility it is to do a root cause analysis of the problem.    

“Errors should be fixed from the root.”  

It’s easy to decide whose responsibility it is to do a root cause analysis of the problem. The ICC has involved the business in having access to Nodinite to understand and fix the issues. The business side can make a solution themselves and resend the message without the involvement of the ICC.  

In Boliden’s IT-department, the policy is to have errors corrected in the sending system; Errors should be dealt with by the sender, the ICC should not repair and/or resend the messages.  

The power of Nodinite  

From the beginning, the purpose of introducing Nodinite is to ensure that message flows like systems and applications, runs as designed. Has the receiver received the sent message? 

Before Boliden implemented Nodinite; The ICC couldn’t prove that a message is indeed successfully delivered to the receiving application.  

This situation caused many questions from the business side. The Nodinite implementation provides logging and monitoring to remedy this situation. During the installation and the start of using Nodinite, they discovered other ways to use the tool. And they saw the other possibilities Nodinite is now accessible for the whole organisation.  

In the beginning, the setup for Nodinite was small and easy. Then they started a project around Nodinite to implement it in on all the integrations in Boliden and use it as a standard framework for all the logging and monitoring.  

The Business side  

The business side has a great value of using Nodinite. As soon as only a few people on the business side saw the benefits of using Nodinite, incremental usage was fast spread. The business side can now understand and solve their problems. They have also gained a better understanding that the data they send significantly impact other systems. This new knowledge now leads to changes in their processes. In the end, the result is more efficient digitalisation and processes.  

“Now, we use Nodinite when we develop integrations. We look at how the data looks when it’s going between systems. It is more than a monitoring tool for us. We use Nodinite for everything.”     

The results  

Before introducing Nodinite, the integration team was seen as the black hole where the data went in. It was hard for people to understand what happens to the data inside the integration. The ICC worked hard to dig up the faulty messages to show the business side that this is how the data looks. Troubleshooting was a big part of their job before Nodinite. After implementing and extending the usage of Nodinite, the ICC rarely get any questions. They are transparent with the data when it flows in and when it flows out.  

Return on Investment  

“If we take everything into consideration, the ROI is 3-4 months”. It was an excellent project installing and extending the usage of Nodinite. The project released on January 1st 2021.  

“We will continue to save both time and money, thanks to Nodinite.”