Basalt AG unifies industrial data with Microsoft Fabric for near real-time operational insights

For Basalt AG, the challenge was gaining consistent operational visibility across a rapidly expanding, highly distributed business. With hundreds of production sites functioning under different conditions, leaders struggled to understand how individual locations were performing, identify issues early, or confidently compare results from one site to another. 

As a manufacturing company specializing in construction materials, Basalt supports mobility infrastructure in addition to road and civil engineering projects across Europe. With the company’s 250-plus locations and a long history of acquisitions, each facility brought its own systems (if it brought any), interfaces, and data challenges to production throughput, downtime, and energy-intensive processes. This heterogeneity makes it difficult to compare performance across sites or align machine signals from one location to another.

“Before this project, the biggest challenge was simply understanding what data we needed to collect. Information lived in many different places, and until we started building, we didn’t have the transparency or structure to use it consistently,” says Heiko Bornemann, Head of IT Infrastructure at Basalt AG. 

From an IT decision maker perspective, Basalt’s environment created familiar risks, including inconsistent reporting, fragmented ownership, and a landscape held together by manual processes. But before advanced analytics or predictive maintenance could become realistic goals, the company needed a single, governed data foundation.

Basalt AG needed timely, consistent insight across its locations, and is now rolling out a unified data platform to support near real‑time operational decisions as more sites come online.

Moving from fragmented industrial data to a governed platform

A primary driver in Basalt’s decision was the need for centralized governance, ensuring performance discussions were based on trusted, comparable data. The organization wanted a single, controlled environment that would prevent different departments or locations from solving problems in isolation. Because of the diversity of its distributed sites, Basalt is implementing the platform in phases, with additional locations being connected as part of the ongoing rollout.

“We were very deliberate about avoiding a collection of isolated solutions. The priority was choosing a single strategic platform that could be governed centrally and trusted across the business as we scale," says Jens Brodowski, CIO at Basalt AG.

Microsoft Fabric aligned closely with that requirement. While Basalt did not begin the journey with deep internal experience in data platforms, it did have significant familiarity with the Microsoft ecosystem and Azure technology stack. 

That familiarity, along with the support of Microsoft partner ORAYLIS, became key factors to the project’s success. Fabric provided a way to start quickly without introducing another vendor platform to evaluate, deploy, and operate. 

An architectural choice that accelerated scale

One of the most important design decisions for Basalt was how to handle data standardization. 

Instead of requiring every site to normalize data before onboarding, the team chose to ingest standardized operational data into Fabric and manage harmonization centrally. This would help improve visibility for multiple roles, from site managers overseeing daily operations to regional leaders comparing performance across locations.

“That decision changed everything for us. Once we agreed to send standardized data into Fabric and do the work in the platform, it became much easier to connect new sites quickly and consistently,” explains Bornemann.

For IT decision makers, the benefit is clear: this approach avoids early bottlenecks, supports incremental modernization, and ensures governance even when site‑level technology varies.

Laying the groundwork to connect operational technology across distributed sites

Connectivity is rarely uniform in industrial environments. Because each stone pit or plant has its own machines, interfaces, and conditions, ORAYLIS supported the development of a unified operational model for diverse machines and interfaces.

“Every production location is slightly different. Our job was to help bring all that sensor data into one unified model,” says Christian Teusch, Senior Project Manager at ORAYLIS.

Once connectivity was established, complexity shifted to volume and meaning. Machines can generate enormous amounts of data. So, the challenge was identifying which signals mattered and how to model them consistently. Examples include detecting unplanned downtime during asphalt production or comparing throughput between similar plants.

“We had to map different machines and sensor signals into common KPIs so that performance could be compared across locations. That baseline is what makes scale possible,” explains Teusch.

With unified systems and standardized processing patterns in place, the architecture is designed to reduce onboarding time as additional sites are connected.

Governance, security, and controlled access from day one

Basalt’s scale made access control nonnegotiable. Different companies and departments operate under one organizational umbrella, and data visibility must be carefully managed.

“One of our first questions was who can see what. We needed to make sure that access was clearly defined and enforced as the platform grew,” says Bornemann.

To accomplish this, Basalt emphasized role‑based access and data classification. The team used built‑in capabilities to ensure only authorized users could view specific datasets, establishing trust in the platform as adoption expanded. 

In addition, the team focused on operational discipline through proper environments, deployment processes, and oversight. The architecture included separation between development and production, along with structured layers for data ingestion, transformation, and visualization. 

Early outcomes: Transparency and less manual work

While full ROI measurement is still evolving, early benefits were clear. With the implementation of Fabric, visibility began to improve for multiple roles.

“For the first time, site managers, regional operators, and energy leads can see what’s happening without waiting for reports. Fabric will help teams connect what they see to events like maintenance or issues on the ground,” says Bornemann.

Equally important is the reduction in manual effort. Data that once required manual collection, spreadsheet-based reconciliation, and ad hoc reporting is starting to flow through the platform for initial use cases, reducing reporting effort and lowering the risk of inconsistent data.

Although it is still too early to define exact time savings, feedback from Basalt’s teams has been consistent: work that once had to be done by hand is no longer necessary. 

Basalt also recognized that success depended on adoption by non-IT teams. Many site personnel were not accustomed to working with dashboards or analytics tools, so training focused on practical use—showing managers how to apply insights, helping build trust in the data, and encouraging consistent use.

These early improvements reflect the sites that are already connected, while the continued rollout is expected to extend benefits across the remaining locations.

Preparing for what comes next with a strong foundation

With a unified data foundation established, Basalt continues to connect hundreds of sites while also getting ready to expand into more advanced scenarios. Near‑term priorities include more automated energy management and reporting. Over time, the platform can support predictive maintenance by analyzing organizational health signals, such as temperature and pressure.

The same visibility into energy use and material flows is helping Basalt strengthen sustainability reporting today, addressing regulatory compliance, energy cost control, and growing executive accountability.

AI is part of the longer‑term roadmap, but Basalt is moving deliberately. The goal is not to replace people, but to ensure operations remain resilient as workforce challenges grow, using data to support better decisions and more efficient processes.

For organizations managing asset-heavy, distributed operations, Basalt’s journey illustrates an early but deliberate path toward improving efficiency and scalability through shared operational visibility and a centrally governed data foundation.

As Basalt brings more locations onto the platform, this same foundation will support deeper optimization. Linking operational transparency to sustainability reporting, predictive maintenance, and future AI‑driven insights across its industrial sites is giving Basalt the competitive edge that the organization needs for the future.

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