See how Microsoft Azure empowered Thomas Concrete Group to drive its industry into the modern era

Kickstarting digital transformation in the concrete industry

At any given moment, someone around the world is constructing the roads, buildings, and homes that make up modern life. Concrete production is the biggest part of that global construction industry, with concrete itself the second-most widely used substance―in construction or otherwise―in the world, second only to water.  

Understandably, then, it’s a big deal when a key player in its markets decides to modernize business operations. Thomas Concrete Group, based in Gothenburg, Sweden, wanted to kickstart its digital transformation by developing an internal platform that could better align its global workforce and drive value for customers. Since it needed this platform to be fast, adaptable, and future proof, the company turned to Microsoft and the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.  

Modernizing a traditional industry with innovative cloud solutions

Many industries related to construction, like concrete, are quite traditional. That is, they aren’t typically the first in line to implement the newest digital technologies on the market.  

“The construction industry is typically far behind many other industries [as far as digitizing],” says Lennart Björnström, CIO and Head of Business Development. “Thomas Concrete Group is trying to get ahead in innovating how we work and how we serve customers.” 

For Thomas Concrete Group, this meant building a digital collaboration platform that could connect its vendors, partners, and customers with accurate and up-to-date information This platform would also help them align their strategy of providing new and innovative services to their customers. 

Björnström recognized a chance to put Thomas Concrete Group ahead of its competition and situate the company to deliver on its vision to be perceived as the best in the industry. However, enacting this platform proved difficult due to the legacy on-premises technology that Thomas Concrete Group used. When Björnström joined the company, he noted that too much hard work from a very talented team was needed just “keeping the lamp green,” which means that IT teams were consumed with essentially managing the integrity of these legacy systems.  

Björnström determined that the new internal platform was needed to re-focus the team on supporting the business better in both running and especially developing new ways of working―and new ways of providing services to our customers. “We needed speed in this situation,” Björnström said. “Having everything on-premises was going to be too slow to accelerate the transition.” The ability to build apps fast, migrate older data easily, and deploy Azure resources when and where they needed them, was its highest priority.  

Since the company already had a large Microsoft footprint, Björnström decided to turn to Azure because it provided a scalable and reliable cloud foundation that it could build on into the foreseeable future.   

Building with Azure

To make the move to Azure, Björnström’s team needed to face the challenge of moving from older on-premises and cloud technology. Working with Microsoft, however, helped them tackle the task. “We saw the Azure public cloud and the built-in platform services as the enabler for this transition,” he explains.

By using Microsoft Azure Data Warehouse, linked with Azure platform services and application such as Microsoft Power BI, Björnström and his team could link data, their workforce, and customers through their platform so that they could all share the same information making the communication with customers more efficient.  

While it’s too early to quantify the hard gains the team may have made with their platform, Björnström says that the improvements are clear. “We are more efficient in our processes and in the way we serve our customers,” he says. “Now we can respond swiftly [to business and customer needs] where before we couldn’t.” 

With this kind of responsiveness, Thomas Concrete Group has a clear ambition to set itself apart from its competitors in the concrete industry, and with the help of Azure tools, Björnström is already looking to the future. He mentions the out-of-the-box support of Azure for IoT and Azure Machine Learning as specific solutions that Thomas Concrete Group have started to work with to bring new and innovative services to their customers. 

Conclusion

Thomas Concrete Group wanted to get ahead of the concrete industry, which meant building operations to guarantee that the company could connect partners, customers, and team members with real data. The company was able to do that, while looking to the future, with Azure. 

Cloud platforms like Azure provide the scalability to help companies like Thomas Concrete Group take its existing operation and transform it for the future.