In Belgium’s Flanders region, 600,000 smart meters watch every drop of water flowing through homes and businesses. When a meter spots trouble—say, three liters trickling away every hour for 3 straight days—it immediately triggers an alert. A letter lands in that customer’s mailbox the subsequent day, warning them in regards to the hidden leak.
This type of automated intervention is powered by event-driven architecture (EDA), the inspiration of the Smart Water platform. At its core, EDA connects scattered devices and applications across hybrid environments—including on-premises systems, cloud platforms, and edge devices—allowing disparate systems to speak immediately when something anomalous happens. Unlike traditional systems that check for problems on a schedule, EDA responds the moment an event occurs, whether that is a leaking pipe, an urgent customer request, or signs of a bigger system failure.
As businesses face mounting pressure to reply immediately to every thing from customer demands to produce chain disruptions, real-time responsiveness is becoming essential.
What this implies in practical terms is that corporations can catch problems before they change into crises and automate responses accordingly—in addition to scale their operations more seamlessly. And as businesses face mounting pressure to reply immediately to every thing from customer demands to produce chain disruptions, this sort of real-time responsiveness is becoming essential.
The push toward EDA is each a technical evolution and a strategic necessity.
Legacy batch processing or request/response models often cause costly delays in a world where market conditions shift by the minute. What’s more, as data volumes balloon, conventional processing methods can buckle under the strain.
The push toward EDA is each a technical evolution and a strategic necessity.
Meanwhile, customer experience expectations are outstripping what rigid, point-to-point connections and aging middleware can support. Hybrid and multi-cloud architectures further complicate integration; easy API polling isn’t sufficient for delivering the form of frictionless experiences today’s business landscape demands.
EDA addresses these challenges with several capabilities: Event brokers and meshes deliver messages reliably across interconnected systems; event streaming enables continuous processing of high-volume data flows; and advanced event processing identifies complex patterns and triggers responses almost immediately. Perhaps most significantly, EDA’s loosely coupled architecture provides the pliability and resilience required for dynamic, high-volume data ecosystems.
Across industries, these capabilities are delivering tangible value. For instance, retailers are turning to EDA to drive smart inventory management and seamless omnichannel experiences. Manufacturers can monitor production lines and maintain supply chain visibility. Within the financial services sector, institutions can detect fraud instantaneously. In healthcare, providers can manage critical equipment with proactive monitoring and rapid response.
In Farys’ case, each regulatory mandates and strategic vision have driven EDA adoption. “We knew smart water meter laws was coming; we’ve to be fully digitized by 2030,” explains Inge Opreel, CIO of Farys. However the regulatory deadline simply accelerated plans already in motion: The corporate had amassed 25 years of knowledge spanning water quality, network performance, and customer interactions—together with an ever-growing stream of operational data—and was searching for a solution to make this vast amount of data actionable.
So, when the corporate decided to design a brand new data strategy for a multi-utility collaboration project, it realized it required a brand new architectural approach. Farys operates the Smart Water platform in partnership with two other water corporations, each of which have their very own platforms and landscapes, subsequently, a holistic and careful number of shared technology was critical to satisfy the extra complexity for these three corporations working in collaboration. “We wanted to bring all of our data together, make sure that it was high-quality, and make sure the business could trust it,” says Opreel. “We wanted to find a way to do asynchronous data processing, a maximum automation of actions and follow-up activities, and automatic reprocessing.”
Farys’ Smart Water system integrates digital water meters, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, and other data sources to process events across 1000’s of kit points throughout its water network.
Considered one of the platform’s most advanced use cases is its water balance application, which enables 3D monitoring of water flow across the corporate’s entire infrastructure. It captures what enters the network (including water produced and its quality), tracks consumption patterns, and monitors what exits—whether to residential consumers, other water corporations, or large industrial users.
“There’s numerous streaming data coming in… You should find a way to interpolate or do calculations to fill the gaps, in order that with validated data and enriched data, we are able to really monitor the network and calculate the flow on a regional or district level.” Inge Opreel, Chief Information Officer, Farys
The system should be configured to perform complex calculations in brief order. “For master data management, once a tool like a high flow meter is created, you wish events to be created in your SCADA system. That is the core where you could have numerous events that trigger master data creation or changes, something like 2.2 million data events a day,” explains Opreel. “There’s numerous streaming data coming in… You should find a way to interpolate or do calculations to fill the gaps, in order that with validated data and enriched data, we are able to really monitor the network and calculate the flow on a regional or district level.”
To support this level of integration and automation, Farys relies on SAP S/4HANA (SAP’s next-generation ERP) as its digital core, with SAP Advanced Event Mesh running on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). “We use mixed integration to SAP very easily, and in addition to non-SAP environments,” notes Opreel. “Because event mesh has numerous standard connectors and knows numerous protocols, it may possibly intake data and/or events like MQTT, which is fairly broadly used inside operational technology. These integration capabilities, out of the box, help us to deliver it more quickly, they usually’re very stable.”
The business outcomes from Farys’ event-driven approach are each measurable and meaningful; the leak-detection capability alone drives substantial value for purchasers while contributing to Farys’ broader sustainability goals.
Take, for instance, the “continuous consumption” scenario described earlier: On average, 75% of households that receive alerts of potential problems (often, a running toilet or unseen leak) resolve their issue inside two weeks. This concurrently conserves precious resources and helps customers avoid unnecessary costs.
Beyond these immediate advantages, EDA provides long-term strategic benefits. The architecture creates an integration foundation that may easily incorporate recent data sources and support emerging technologies. It improves operational resilience by enabling systems to proceed functioning even when individual components go offline or are being upgraded. It also strengthens regulatory compliance through automated reporting and monitoring; Farys’ water balance application, for example, allows the utility to exactly calculate its International Leakage Index (ILI) and report those metrics to relevant regulatory authorities.
EDA also plays a pivotal role within the AI era: It feeds AI systems the wealthy, real-time data they should make informed decisions at scale.
As event-driven systems evolve to work alongside AI agents, this mix stands to remodel how businesses operate.
Farys is already exploring what’s next. Opreel envisions using event-driven insights for dynamic water pricing—routinely adjusting rates based on supply conditions. “For instance, where there’s an overflow of water and we are able to produce water very cheaply, we could give triggers to farmers,” she says. “Let’s imagine, ‘Hey, when you take water between 12:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m., we can provide it to you at a lower cost, because our energy costs to provide water are lower. You possibly can keep that as a buffer, because we all know in the approaching weeks, there is not going to be much rainfall.'”
Firms that construct these capabilities now—before they desperately need them—could have a decisive advantage over those scrambling to catch up retroactively.
This type of adaptive business model represents the longer term that EDA makes possible. Firms that construct these capabilities now—before they desperately need them—could have a decisive advantage over those scrambling to catch up retroactively.
“By having event-driven architecture already just a few years in place, it makes it easier to meet the interior and external demands of your online business,” says Opreel. “Should you wait until the demand is there, you continue to have to begin constructing your technology layer. By anticipating that, and positively having chosen a scalable architecture on that part, we are able to fulfill business demands in a more agile way than we used to.”
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By MIT Technology Review Insights
