Last year July, The Greenery and Mulder Onions BV reached an agreement about a management buy-out of the onion company. A step by The Greenery to focus more on its core activity. That step also meant the start of many changes for Mulder Onions. The changes in the field of IT weren’t the smallest of those.
“A hectic period in which contracts had to be entered into with phone and internet providers, and we had to decide how to organise the IT,” says Tim van Haandel from Mulder Onions. With that, he gives an overview of a number of changes that had to be made. These services were previously taken care of by The Greenery. For many of these services, the onion trader went to RPO ICT Solutions. “We were already working together when we were still part of The Greenery,” Tim continues. “The decision to go with RPO was therefore obvious.”
Tim van Haandel from Mulder Onions and Paul van der Es from RPO ICT Solutions.
Disentangling data
Besides, Mulder received new software in 2012. “They then implemented Freshng Advanced,” explains Paul van der Es from RPO ICT Solutions. Mulder Onions has been working with RPO software since 1992. “We were very satisfied with the pack that allows us to have sales and orders in one system,” Tim adds. “We have thought about what we wanted to do better and differently.” That resulted in revelations that, among other things, the speed of the system could be faster when RPO servers would be used.
That was only a first step in the process. The real work started with disentangling the data in The Greenery’s system. The data belonging to Mulder Onions was located at The Greenery’s servers. All that data had to be transferred to RPO’s server. Mails, contacts, spreadsheets and other files had to be moved between the servers. RPO took two months to prepare this migration, and to make an inventory of which data had to be moved.
Custom-work becomes standard
The move occurred on 26 November 2016. On Friday 25 November, the system still operated through The Greenery, on Monday 28 November it was operating on RPO’s servers, and Mulder could resume the onion trade. “Everything had to be transferred, you need to make good agreements for that,” Paul explains. “On Monday, the communication had to be in order, so that Mulder could work as usual. This all went off without a hitch.”
Mulder uses the standard package, completed with specific functionality for the onion administration. “Eventually, this will be added to the standard package and other companies can also use it.” Two examples of additional functionalities used by Mulder, are related to order processing at Customs clearance. In the first case, a tender tool has been added to the software. With that, a buyer can draft a complete tender for a customer. The tender is made into an order at the click of a mouse, without data having to be entered again. Each order has been provided with a task list that has to be completed. That list encompasses, for example, things such as type of packaging and transport. Besides, this has been directly coupled with Customs to request export documents.
Hosting solution
RPO offers a standard hosting service in which a kind of three-cornered relationship comes into existence between customer, data centre 1 and data centre 2. In principle, the customer operates on server 1. When no connection with that server is possible, the customer can reach the data in data centre 1 through data centre 2. If data centre 1 breaks down, data centre 2 completely takes over. “We have a so-called triangular relationship between the customer and the data centres,” Paul explains. “Furthermore, we offer a complete contingency facility.”
That this is not a superfluous luxury became apparent on 2 January. Internet provider Ziggo struggled with a blackout in the Kerkrade region. The connection with the worldwide web was also unavailable to Mulder Onions. “We then immediately called RPO, in order to make use of the contingency facility,” Tim says. With that service, internet access is guaranteed. In the end, the blackout was quickly solved by Ziggo, and the contingency plan did not have to be used. “It is important to have it, you need to be available,” Tim concludes. “You can no longer do without IT.”
More information:
Mulder Onions
Tim van Haandel