Bayer doubles product development speed with API-led integrations

Challenge

Moving beyond custom point-to-point connections

Bayer Crop Science is the agricultural and environmental branch of Bayer Corporation. The company conducts scientific research and innovates solutions to help feed our planet, such as new seeds that help farmers overcome challenges such as pests, diseases and drought.

The Salesforce instance at Bayer had grown into a large, sprawling ecosystem spanning multiple groups across the globe. For example, Salesforce is integrated with mobile applications, master data repositories, and the Bayer ERP system. Before MuleSoft, these connections were made via a custom point-to-point (P2P) integration pipeline, which was challenging and costly to manage and scale. Data was held in silo systems that were difficult to access, consequently slowing down product development and other projects at Bayer. In addition, due to the complexity, it was difficult for Bayer to resolve faults in the system, resulting in project delays that negatively impacted the business. It was time for Bayer to implement a new integration strategy.

Objectives

Establishing a worldwide integration strategy

Bayer needed to update their technology, break down data silos and become more agile by:

• Establishing a scalable, consistent, future-proof integration strategy that is repeatable throughout the business to reduce development time and increase speed to market.
• Integrating multiple ecosystems around the globe with mobile applications, data repositories, and their SAP ERP system.
• Delivering a single view of the customer to stakeholders across the organization.

Solution

Creating a single view of all customer data via API-led connectivity

Bayer deployed MuleSoft Anypoint Platform to integrate Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud using API-led connectivity, replacing the P2P integration pipeline. With MuleSoft, Bayer has been able to integrate Salesforce with existing legacy systems, gaining access to data in formerly siloed systems, to create a single view of all customer data.

For example, service cases need to be synced across both Salesforce and Bayer's internal service platform to enable multiple support teams to resolve cases while concurrently working in different systems. The API-based integrations enabled by MuleSoft give stakeholders easy access to the same accurate, up-to-date data, ultimately allowing them to deliver a better customer service experience.

Additional MuleSoft technology — CloudHub, the platform as a service (PaaS) component of Anypoint Platform — eliminated the need for the Bayer team to manage AWS resources. This allowed the team to focus on developing more APIs in MuleSoft, rather than continue to build P2P connections. By eliminating P2P and custom code, MuleSoft has made Bayer's integration architecture future-proof.

In addition, Bayer utilized the MuleSoft Metrics Toolkit to collect and aggregate data from their platform in Jira and publish that information in Splunk dashboards to share across multiple teams.

“MuleSoft's single pane of glass visibility is desirable for every role whether you are a developer or a line of business owner, you can see KPIs, monitoring and analytics. MuleSoft makes it easy for any user in our organization to find the data they need.”

Geoff Hickman
Technical Platform Owner, Bayer.

Moving forward, Bayer is working to consolidate 40+ CRMs into a single global instance of Salesforce, using out-of-the-box connectors from MuleSoft.

Results

Boosting product development speed by 200% using APIs

MuleSoft provided the framework to modernize Bayer's integration platform to accelerate speed to market, increase scalability, lower ongoing maintenance and support costs, and future-proof the company's integration architecture. With integration streamlined via MuleSoft, Bayer's teams have become more agile and productive.

“Previously it took our teams 5-6 weeks to develop a product, and now it takes just 2 weeks, so we are seeing 200% faster product development, and speed to market has increased by 5x.”

Arun Sankarapillal
Senior Director Product Experience Lead - Portfolio and Pricing, Bayer.

Maintenance and support costs have been reduced as well, due to MuleSoft. For example, process functions were reduced by 70% because Bayer did not need as many teams working on the legacy platform, dealing with all the issues it caused in the past. In addition, overhead and security governance decreased by 20% per month.

Reusability is also an important goal MuleSoft helped Bayer achieve. Right out of the box, MuleSoft provided a range of reusable components, such as connectors and job templates. In addition, Bayer has been able to build 40+ reusable APIs with MuleSoft, which results in additional time and cost savings. Bayer has been able to stock their component library in Exchange, so developers can reuse APIs and components on every new project, helping to shorten the development life cycle.

Due to the great success Bayer Crop Science has achieved with MuleSoft, Bayer Corporation is planning to implement MuleSoft throughout the other branches of the company.