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 three straight days—it instantly triggers an alert. A letter lands in that customer’s mailbox the next day, warning them about the hidden leak.
This kind of automated intervention is powered by event-driven architecture (EDA), the foundation 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 communicate instantly when something anomalous happens. Unlike traditional systems that check for problems on a schedule, EDA responds the moment an event occurs, whether that’s a leaking pipe, an urgent customer request, or signs of a larger system failure.
As businesses face mounting pressure to respond instantly to everything from customer demands to supply chain disruptions, real-time responsiveness is becoming essential.
What this means in practical terms is that companies can catch problems before they become crises and automate responses accordingly—as well as scale their operations more seamlessly. And as businesses face mounting pressure to respond instantly to everything from customer demands to supply chain disruptions, this kind of real-time responsiveness is becoming essential.
The push toward EDA is both 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 both 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; simple API polling isn’t sufficient for delivering the kind 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 instantly. Perhaps most importantly, EDA’s loosely coupled architecture provides the flexibility and resilience required for dynamic, high-volume data ecosystems.
Across industries, these capabilities are delivering tangible value. For example, retailers are turning to EDA to drive smart inventory management and seamless omnichannel experiences. Manufacturers can monitor production lines and maintain supply chain visibility. In 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, both regulatory mandates and strategic vision have driven EDA adoption. “We knew smart water meter legislation was coming; we have to be fully digitized by 2030,” explains Inge Opreel, CIO of Farys. But the regulatory deadline simply accelerated plans already in motion: The company had amassed 25 years of data spanning water quality, network performance, and customer interactions—along with an ever-growing stream of operational data—and was seeking a way to make this vast amount of information actionable.
So, when the company decided to design a new data strategy for a multi-utility collaboration project, it realized it required a new architectural approach. Farys operates the Smart Water platform in partnership with two other water companies, each of which have their own platforms and landscapes, therefore, a holistic and careful selection of shared technology was critical to meet the additional complexity for these three companies working in collaboration. “We needed to bring all of our data together, make sure it was high-quality, and ensure the business could trust it,” says Opreel. “We needed to be able to do asynchronous data processing, a maximum automation of actions and follow-up activities, and automated reprocessing.”
Farys’ Smart Water system integrates digital water meters, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, and other data sources to process events across thousands of equipment points throughout its water network.
One of the platform’s most advanced use cases is its water balance application, which enables 3D monitoring of water flow across the company’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 companies, or large industrial users.
“There’s a lot of streaming data coming in… You must be able to interpolate or do calculations to fill the gaps, so that with validated data and enriched data, we can really monitor the network and calculate the flow on a regional or district level.” Inge Opreel, Chief Information Officer, Farys
The system must be configured to perform complex calculations in short order. “For master data management, once a device like a high flow meter is created, you need events to be created in your SCADA system. This is the core where you have a lot of events that trigger master data creation or changes, something like 2.2 million data events a day,” explains Opreel. “There’s a lot of streaming data coming in… You must be able to interpolate or do calculations to fill the gaps, so that with validated data and enriched data, we can 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 also to non-SAP environments,” notes Opreel. “Because event mesh has a lot of standard connectors and knows a lot of protocols, it can intake data and/or events like MQTT, which is fairly broadly used within operational technology. These integration capabilities, out of the box, help us to deliver it more quickly, and they’re very stable.”
The business outcomes from Farys’ event-driven approach are both measurable and meaningful; the leak-detection capability alone drives substantial value for customers while contributing to Farys’ broader sustainability goals.
Take, for example, 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 within two weeks. This simultaneously conserves precious resources and helps customers avoid unnecessary costs.
Beyond these immediate benefits, EDA provides long-term strategic advantages. The architecture creates an integration foundation that can easily incorporate new data sources and support emerging technologies. It improves operational resilience by enabling systems to continue 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 instance, allows the utility to precisely calculate its International Leakage Index (ILI) and report those metrics to relevant regulatory authorities.
EDA also plays a pivotal role in the AI era: It feeds AI systems the rich, real-time data they need to make informed decisions at scale.
As event-driven systems evolve to work alongside AI agents, this combination stands to transform how businesses operate.
Farys is already exploring what’s next. Opreel envisions using event-driven insights for dynamic water pricing—automatically adjusting rates based on supply conditions. “For example, where there’s an overflow of water and we can produce water very cheaply, we could give triggers to farmers,” she says. “We could say, ‘Hey, if you take water between 12:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m., we can give it to you at a lower price, because our energy costs to produce water are lower. You can keep that as a buffer, because we know in the coming weeks, there will not be much rainfall.'”
Companies that build these capabilities now—before they desperately need them—will have a decisive advantage over those scrambling to catch up retroactively.
This kind of adaptive business model represents the future that EDA makes possible. Companies that build these capabilities now—before they desperately need them—will have a decisive advantage over those scrambling to catch up retroactively.
“By having event-driven architecture already a few years in place, it makes it easier to fulfill the internal and external demands of your business,” says Opreel. “If you wait until the demand is there, you still have to start building your technology layer. By anticipating that, and certainly having chosen a scalable architecture on that part, we can fulfill business demands in a more agile way than we used to.”
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