Spanish Point Technologies

Founded in 1965 and headquartered in Ireland, Kingspan is the global leader in high-performance insulation and building envelope solutions. Since the beginning, Kingspan has always been dedicated to innovation as a means of improving construction. They believe in challenging the construction industry traditions through innovating in advanced materials and digital technologies.

Kingspan wants to provide its clients and partners with customized digital solutions and the newest digital technology. With 129 locations and over 14,000 employees across the globe, Kingspan today is a €8.3bn revenue group with six main business streams across 212 manufacturing sites in over 80 countries.

The Building Information Modelling (BIM) division of Kingspan’s Group discovered through a performance study that, at any given moment, 2 to 10 different business units around the organization were developing the same subset of digital solutions for addressing similar problems. Kingspan realized that demands and difficulties were shared throughout its divisions, and the innovation stack was determined by the division’s skillset, resources, and emerging challenges.

azure virtual desktop

The Challenge

As a broader business-led initiative, Kingspan decided to provide a core set infrastructure for application development and deployment that helped over 170 business units around the globe. This decision allowed Kingspan’s internal and external stakeholders to advance towards innovation in a more efficient, cost-effective, standardized, and secure way rather than by duplication. Utilizing the latest digital technologies, Kingspan aims to empower its customers and partners with tailored digital solutions that prepare them for what is expected in the future of a modern, dynamic industry.

With its focus on the emerging Digital Built Environment technology landscape, Kingspan created a unique, comprehensive, and showcase approach for its clients and the entire construction industry. One of their main priorities was to enable all of their divisions to acquire basic application and infrastructure components, with the potential of reuse whilst preparing for resilience, in order to improve business readiness and encourage digital transformation.

The Solution

To support them with this initiative, the Kingspan Group reached out to Spanish Point’s team to design and build the Kingspan tools platform, now called DevLeo, offering their partners, customers, and additional stakeholders the opportunity to enable growth through connection. This tool provides a unique combination of standard application and infrastructure components designed to rapidly assess, build, deploy and manage web application tools for configuring or designing Kingspan products in the field with a central Group Digital Hub.

Kingspan selected Spanish Point as their technology partner to design and build their new tools platform, DevLeo. The audience for these tools can be internal, external or a combination of both and it is supported centrally 24×7.

Using an Agile methodology, Spanish Point designed and built a cloud migration solution that allows Kingspan to take advantage of the latest technologies and supports scalability. Kingspan trusted Spanish Point to set the digital foundations for application development procedures and technology infrastructure, so that Kingspan could focus on their business challenges. Additional support was provided through a series of workshops to identify the different entities of the core hub and the different applications needed, using best practices to comply with current industry regulations and standards.

Key Benefits

Operation Efficiencies

Cost Effective

Broad implementation of best practices and governance

Modern DevOps

Foster and drive innovation

Gain Flexibility and Scalability

The Result

DevLeo makes available a set of Microsoft Azure IaaS and PaaS based services to tools providers with the configuration and settings needed to comply with Kingspan’s Azure Governance Framework. This means that App developers can focus on functionality while being confident that the underlying Azure services are deployed and configured in a way that conforms to best practices in terms of security, availability and scalability. It maintains a service catalogue of approved Azure IaaS and PaaS based services complete with parameterized infrastructure templates provided by Spanish Point’s SMART AIM Library solution.

Spanish Point’s SMART AIM library provided Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates, configuration files and associated build and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines for deploying each Tool or App hosted in Azure Services. These artifacts are used within Azure DevOps to ensure that the Azure infrastructure and environments for each Tool or App are deployed in a consistent way with approved best practice configurations. This approach simplifies the process for Tools developers enabling them to focus on application functionality.

“DevLeo is a key digital transformation initiative, to develop internal and customer facing applications for the emerging digital built environment, as well as migrate and standardise the existing app landscape into Azure with a central Group Digital hub.
We selected Spanish Point to design and build this central core set of cloud services that our business units can call upon through a defined API, using their SMART AIM solution offering, to provide this modern innovative cloud solution.
Spanish Point’s team immediately understood and embraced the complexity of what we were trying to achieve and have provided us exceptional support and advice as we leverage the Azure offering and SMART AIM solution as part of our digital transformation.”

Brian Glancy

Head of BIM Strategy

Kingspan Group