Koch Industries consists of a dozen subsidiary companies including Georgia-Pacific, Invista, and Molex all working together with one common goal: drive continuous improvement for customers. The conglomerate's full portfolio of companies provides products including polymers, fertilizers, electronics, glass, minerals, biofuels, and more.

Koch employs 122,000 employees in over 70 countries with about half of its business in the United States. It's one of the largest privately-held companies in America with $110 billion in annual revenues according to Forbes.

Comprising separate businesses each with their own data systems and siloes, Koch Industries’ major challenge—as well as its success—is that it's an enterprise of enterprises. Many Koch businesses were undergoing a transformation. As they modernized, they exposed areas needing data improvement, governance, and better management. As individual entities make progress with data governance using TIBCO EBX data management software, the Koch global team will be able to increase focus on enterprise-wide data governance and analytics.

Koch needs better data management and governance practices across its complex enterprise to function seamlessly, enable smoother data practices and processes, and facilitate business growth with more accurate analytics. With TIBCO, Koch's key goal is to democratize data across its complex enterprise.

The company turned to TIBCO to help design the right master data management (MDM) approach and pilot implementations where each tenant is a business-specific data space or network of systems. The company wanted a data governance tool capable of supporting many systems, not one confined to prebuilt data models and attached to an ERP. It needed out-of-the-box functionality while being fully customizable because each business has its own IT team with its own methodologies. And it needed to support other pillars of data governance including data lineage and a data catalog.

Koch chose a hybrid MDM approach enabled by TIBCO EBX software because it worked with Koch's other master data and metadata tools, approaches, and data pipelines.

The TIBCO solution brings transparency and structure to an almost unbelievably complex system. With the new platform, the Koch team can design autonomous data spaces for each business, enable a shared data platform, and make progress towards streamlining data sharing across the enterprise. Since working with the first few businesses, Koch has built 10 tenants with eight in production. So far, each new tenant experiences faster time-to-value than the one before.

According to Jason Wingate, Enterprise EBX product owner at Koch Global Services, "Our data governance platform needed to solve problems with out-of-box functionality and be fully customizable if our IT teams wanted to pursue that. We found EBX software to be able to provide all this, and we've been pleased with the results."

Koch Industries' new platform drives collaboration across its disparate businesses, encouraging the sharing of best data practices. The platform allows the enterprise to share templated functions so each company can tailor and independently implement MDM solutions. With this solution, Koch can democratize development and enable autonomous tenants. With so many enterprises, it's an ongoing journey, but the company is primed to move forward successfully.

According to Dennis Claussen, director of business transformation at Koch Global Services, "We can democratize development so companies can be autonomous, yet create pipelines and leverage tooling to allow everyone to go faster together. We have a path to grow towards more instances as our needs mature or performance requires. For now, it was definitely a good decision for us to go with a single instance multi-tenant strategy."

The out-of-the-box functionality of the new platform allows the team to reduce the development cycle and ramp up efficiency. Koch reports major cost efficiency through its leveraged stack and a significant increase in data quality, reporting, and functions.

"Koch's enterprise data governance and enterprise analytics enablement still has a long way to go, but with EBX software, we feel we have a good partner and a good platform to help in our success in this journey,” says Claussen.

Wingate confirms, “All our teams are learning rapidly. A couple of them are on their second and third projects, and they are extending their usage of EBX software into other areas besides the standard out-of-the-box master data management functionality."