Customer Reference Story
“It keeps going and going and going “: Why bofrost* relies on easy for archiving
about bofrost*
From the ice cream cult classic “botinchen” to traditional chicken fricassee and modern veggie lasagne: frozen food from bofrost* has been a household name for many people since childhood. The brand is the European market leader to be reckoned with when it comes to direct sales of frozen food, ice cream and the like. In Germany alone, the company based in Straelen on the Lower Rhine supplies more than two million customer households, and nearly four million across Europe. bofrost* is one of the great success stories of the German economy. Founded in 1966, the company expanded to become Europe’s largest direct distributor of frozen food. Today, with its 254 branches and almost 11,000 employees throughout Europe, bofrost* generates more than 1.47 billion euros per year.
Long-standing partnership
When the digital cash register rings in one of bofrost*’s approximately 3,000 delivery vehicles in Germany, the receipts thus generated are stored in the background in a cloud from easy. This example shows how diverse the possible applications of an archive solution are. Lars Ronge, Head of the IT/SAP department at bofrost* since 2020, explains how this came about and why easy software has been the perfect partner for bofrost* when it comes to archiving for years.
From an IT perspective, the long-term growth that goes hand in hand with success brings with it new challenges:
“The history of bofrost* has led to each national subsidiary being able to organize itself to a very large extent. On the one hand, this has advantages for business development in the individual countries, but from an IT perspective, it also has certain challenges in terms of the organization as a whole. That is why we are currently working on centralizing the services more in Germany,”
explains Lars Ronge. For IT at bofrost*, this means that a number of major projects are on the agenda for the next few years.
bofrost* has been working with easy for almost 20 years. In 2006, bofrost* introduced SAP as its ERP system for Germany and several other European locations – initially mainly for the finance department. In the course of this changeover, easy archive for SAP was considered by bofrost* to be the ideal archiving solution on the market and was integrated into the system for SAP document archiving. Since then, easy archive has been running in the on-premises version on bofrost*’s company servers: “Fortunately, I can’t report that much about it. It runs flawlessly and our own effort is kept to a minimum,” reports the SAP specialist with a smile. The impeccable performance of the on-premises version and the experience made with easy meant that IT returned to easy software for a later project. This is how the second collaboration came about.
easy archive as a solution for the point of sale
In 2018, bofrost* started planning to replace the point-of-sale devices that the sales drivers in the delivery vehicles use to bill the goods with the end customer: As part of this modernization, the entire technical process associated with the payment process was also redesigned:
“The biggest challenge proved to be the infrastructure in Germany: there are still large blind spots here where there is not a sufficiently strong internet connection. That’s why the new solution had to be implemented as offline-capable.”
Implementation of the project began in 2021: As a result, the new payment process looks like this in technical terms: the new point-of-sale devices cache the payment data in the event of connectivity problems and pass it on to the backend as soon as it can be reached online again. In the backend, the data is then written to the archive – and this is where easy archive comes into play.
“Only the backend, which is permanently accessible on the server, actually communicates with the easy archive,”
says Ronge, explaining the process: ”As soon as the backend has understood the information it receives from the end device, it sends it on to the archive and stores it there. The implementation of easy archive, which was carried out with the support of easy’s IT experts, was therefore no longer a major challenge in this project. What was more important was the reliable functioning of the entire archive system. Every year, around 50 million invoices from transactions in which bofrost* customers buy goods at the door are stored there. This data must be able to be stored at any time and be accessible to the accounting department at bofrost*’s head office.
easy archive: a solution that does its job reliably
In order to be able to guarantee the highest possible reliability without having to invest a great deal of work in maintaining the archive solution themselves, the IT managers at bofrost* decided to integrate the archive into the process as a cloud solution from easy. Ronge describes the implementation of easy archive within the project as “very smooth”. In practice, the expectations of the archive have also been fulfilled:
“It’s actually only the accounting department that comes into contact with it when it comes to checking and tracking certain documents.”
For the IT department, the archive is a solution that should function smoothly and without the use of in-house resources.
However, the project is not yet completely finished: the administration in Straelen currently only accesses the archive via a web interface because the sales department uses an internally developed IT system. However, the latter is soon to be replaced by SAP. The archive with the customer documents will then also be connected to SAP:
“Technically, it has already been implemented, because ultimately we only reference the documents in SAP in digital form as a data record via a link. The accounting user can then call up a receipt in SAP and use this link to jump directly to the easy archive web interface. We are currently in the process of rolling out this solution in all branches.”
The archive as an ideal cloud product
IT at bofrost* now works according to the clear guideline: cloud first. There are historical reasons why some systems, such as the old easy archive, are still used on-premises:
“If we were to re-implement this now, the question would probably not even arise. We would go directly into the cloud. Of course, a decision like this always has to be considered from a business perspective, but for us, a solution such as an archive system under SAP is a typical cloud product.”
In the long term, the old easy archive will therefore also be migrated to the cloud. However, Ronge cannot yet say when this might be the case:
“For us, the archive is a topic that – to be honest – no one in IT is very familiar with and that we only have very few points of contact with in our day-to-day work. It simply works extremely reliably and at the moment we are following the motto Never Change a Running System.”
The pressure to move to the cloud would probably be greater if the on-premises solution meant more effort for us. But it doesn’t. It just keeps going and going and going and so it’s not an issue for us at the moment. There’s no question that a move to the cloud will happen – I’m pretty sure of that. At the same time, I am very confident that we will master this in the future.
Lars Ronge,
Head of the IT/SAP department | bofrost*