Case study · Amorim Cork × Link Consulting

How Amorim Cork moved a critical MES↔SAP platform to MuleSoft — without stopping the factories

Amorim Cork’s MES↔SAP integration carries every production event across four industrial units. It had no functional documentation — and no one left who fully knew how it worked.

In nine months, three Link seniors with no prior MuleSoft experience reconstructed the system’s knowledge from its code, redesigned it as an API-Led architecture and migrated every flow to MuleSoft — using AI tools under full engineering control.

Client

Categorization

Application Modernization
Integration · MuleSoft
AI-assisted Engineering
Industry & Manufacturing

10MuleSoft APIs delivered

100%of flows migrated

0major incidents in production

9months, with a team of three

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Case studies · Interviews

The story, from the people behind the project

How do you migrate a platform no one can document, to a technology no one on the team has used — while the factories keep running?

Watch the interview
Rui Porteiro, João Ribeiro & Frederico Dionísio

Link Consulting

The case

The problem was not just legacy technology. It was a black box.

The platform processes, every day, the production, consumption, adjustment and movement events of Amorim Cork’s four industrial units — AFL, AI, ACC and ACF. If a flow stops, no product leaves the factories. Migrating it was never a technical exercise: it was open-heart surgery.

There was no functional documentation, no requirements specification and no analysts who knew the system. Only the code running in production, SSIS and BizTalk packages, stored procedures, tables — and a single troubleshooting document. Before designing the future, the team had to recover the past.

What does this platform actually do — and what must never stop?

What we had
Legacy code. One troubleshooting document.

What we didn’t have
An analyst. A DBA. A PO. A tester.

The team
Rui Porteiro — Project Manager
João Ribeiro — Technical Lead · part-time
Frederico Dionísio — Senior Developer · 100%

About the client

Amorim Cork — Corticeira Amorim

150+
years of experience — and four industrial units on one integration

Part of Corticeira Amorim, the world leader in cork, Amorim Cork develops cork solutions for still and sparkling wines and spirits — combining a natural, renewable and recyclable raw material with continuous investment in innovation, technology and research.

For a producer at this scale, integration between shop floor and ERP is not back-office plumbing. It is what turns production into product.

Image courtesy of Amorim Cork

How we did it

Start from the code — recover the knowledge.

With Cursor, Claude and Link’s AI Catalog, the team turned the legacy code into a map of the system, debated the target architecture and translated each flow to MuleSoft. AI accelerated the mechanical work; every decision and every conversion stayed with the engineers.

legacy evidence
AI-accelerated, engineer-reviewed
human-owned decision

Stage 0 · Legacy
Code as the only source
SSIS & BizTalk · stored procedures · tables · one troubleshooting doc

Stage 1
Reverse engineering
modules · integrations · dependencies · blocking rules
weeks of analysis → days

Stage 2
API-Led architecture
what to keep, what to rewrite, which patterns — debated with AI, decided by the team

Stage 3
MuleSoft flow generation
each legacy flow translated to Mule XML, at scale

Stage 4 · Final proof
Validated, then live
every conversion validated manually · in production across AFL, AI, ACC, ACF

Mechanical work delegated. Engineering work preserved.

The outcome

What the migration delivered

Knowledge recovered from the code

A system nobody could explain became a documented map of modules, integrations, dependencies and blocking rules. The platform no longer depends on undocumented knowledge.

An API-Led architecture, not a lift-and-shift

The legacy structure was replaced by a modular MuleSoft architecture, ready to evolve — 10 APIs delivered.

The target architecture was designed — not inherited.

Every flow migrated, every conversion validated

100% of the planned flows were translated to MuleSoft with AI support and reviewed by the team before moving forward — speed without giving up control.

In production, with zero major incidents

After nine months the new platform was live across all four industrial units. Delivered. In production. Without a trace.

In their words

The first challenge wasn’t building the new system. It was understanding, rigorously, what already existed. The difference was the team’s ability to interpret what it found, question results and turn them into safe architecture decisions.

Rui PorteiroProject Manager, Link Consulting

Modernising a critical platform takes more than replacing technology. You have to deeply understand what sustains the operation, preserve what still has value and create the conditions to evolve with more agility.

[Name][Role], Amorim Cork

The full story

Want the complete Amorim Cork case study?

Explore the project in more detail — from the undocumented legacy and AI-assisted reverse engineering to the API-Led architecture and the path to production.

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Pages4

LanguageEN

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