Success Story: ENGEL Austria GmbH
"Together with Bacher Systems as a highly competent implementation partner, ENGEL Austria successfully introduced a centralized Splunk analytics platform that reduced the effort required to resolve individual IT incidents by up to 60%, improved collaboration across teams, and established the foundation for a scalable and future-ready IT landscape."
The Challenge
ENGEL Austria faced increasing complexity and growing operational demands within its IT environment while operating with a reduced headcount. Multiple isolated monitoring and logging tools across different teams made troubleshooting more difficult, increased operational effort, and occasionally created communication challenges between departments.
The company's objective was to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and relieve IT teams of routine operational tasks so they could focus on strategic, value-adding initiatives.
The Solution
Together with Bacher Systems as a trusted and experienced implementation partner, ENGEL chose to deploy a centralized Splunk analytics platform as the foundation for a comprehensive monitoring and observability strategy.
Platform Components:
- Splunk Cloud
- Splunk Enterprise Security
- Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI)
- Splunk Observability
- Splunk Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)
Bacher Systems provided consulting, solution design, and implementation services throughout the project.
At the same time, the project focused on strengthening ENGEL's internal expertise, enabling the IT organization to further expand its capabilities in monitoring and analytics.
By consolidating all relevant data sources—from firewalls and network infrastructure to applications and security events – ENGEL established a centralized platform built on open standards such as OpenTelemetry, providing a unified view of logs, metrics, and traces.
The Implementation
Beginning in 2022, the solution was implemented through several parallel workstreams covering Security, ITSI, and Observability. Experts from ENGEL and Bacher Systems collaborated closely within a joint project team, supported by Bacher Systems' structured project management approach.
The project initially focused on integrating firewalls and network infrastructure, followed by security use cases, including Splunk Enterprise Security, correlation searches, SOAR automation for false-positive handling, and the expansion of infrastructure monitoring.
Within the Observability workstream, monitoring capabilities were implemented for Kubernetes environments and cloud-based applications, including the customer portal.
Running the workstreams in parallel also accelerated knowledge transfer across teams and enabled the platform to evolve continuously. Throughout the project, implementation was closely aligned with business stakeholders and consistently focused on delivering measurable value for IT and service owners.
Results and Benefits
- Significantly reduced operational effort: The effort required to resolve complex IT incidents has been reduced by up to 60%.
- More time for strategic IT initiatives: By reducing day-to-day operational workload, IT teams can focus on projects that create greater business value.
- Consolidation and centralization: Multiple standalone solutions, including Elastic and various open-source tools, were replaced with a centralized platform featuring consolidated dashboards across all relevant data sources.
- Proactive issue detection: The organization transitioned from reactive operations to a proactive approach. A centralized real-time view enables potential issues to be identified and resolved before they impact the business.
- Improved cross-functional collaboration: All departments now work from the same platform, simplifying communication and accelerating troubleshooting.
- Scalability and future readiness: The platform continues to scale with business requirements, including client integration and future OT use cases, while remaining flexible through open standards.
- Improved Service Level Agreements (SLAs): Faster root cause analysis and proactive operations contribute to better SLA compliance and lower overall operating costs.
- Cultural transformation: Rather than being perceived as another mandatory IT initiative, the platform was introduced as an opportunity to discover new value, fostering strong user adoption and greater initiative across teams.
About ENGEL Austria GmbH
ENGEL Austria GmbH is one of the world's leading manufacturers of injection molding machines and automation solutions for the plastics processing industry. The company delivers end-to-end solutions—from innovative machinery and customized automation to digital services. ENGEL is recognized for its innovation, technological leadership, and commitment to sustainable manufacturing.
With approximately 7,000 employees, ENGEL has a global presence. Nine production facilities across Europe, North America, and Asia, along with subsidiaries and representatives in more than 85 countries, ensure close customer relationships and first-class service. Founded in 1945, the company remains 100% family-owned and is headquartered in Schwertberg, Austria.
Involved Technology Partner
Bacher Systems is the largest Splunk partner in Austria with Elite status for Sales and Managed Services and Splunk's partner in Germany.
Splunk offers software solutions for monitoring, analyzing, and visualizing machine data, including log management, security solutions (SIEM), IT infrastructure monitoring (IT Service Intelligence), application monitoring (APM), artificial intelligence, and Machine Learning.
