ReferenCE Story
easy archive makes Halfar’s ERP rollout a smooth process from start to finish
about Halfar System GmbH
Halfar System GmbH, based in Bielefeld, is an established bag manufacturer that focuses on two main areas: promotional bags and special bags.
The company has been developing a wide range of backpacks and bags as promotional items and merchandising since 1986. At the same time, it manufactures customized, technical special bags and belt systems for special requirements, such as for medical equipment or tools. The company employs around 120 people at its site in Bielefeld.
bag specialist in east westphalia
Halfar System GmbH in Bielefeld is a highly specialized, quality-oriented company with great expertise in its market segment. The core competence of the East Westphalian family-owned business is bags. These are designed, produced and distributed for two very different markets: on the one hand as price-conscious advertising materials with customizable logos, and on the other as tailor-made high-end solutions for special applications.
Halfar places great importance on values such as quality, sustainability and innovation in order to remain competitive. Acting with foresight and keeping up with the times is also crucial for the IT department, reports Olaf Werner, who is responsible for introducing the cloud-based ERP solution Microsoft Dynamics Business Central as project manager in the Digital Development team.
the only way forward was to migrate easy to the cloud
Once Halfar had paved the way for introducing a cloud-based ERP solution with the company-wide introduction of Microsoft OFFICE365, including Teams, it was also clear that the archive had to be moved to the cloud at the same time. After all, document management is one of Halfar’s central business processes, and it is closely linked to the ERP system.
easy had to reapply for the cloud
Halfar had already digitized its document management in 2011 with the on-premises version of easy archive: from procurement and logistics to customer orders, all relevant documents such as invoices, delivery bills and emails are stored there in an audit-proof and GDPR-compliant manner. However, as Olaf Werner and his team had decided to completely rebuild the archive in the cloud, they saw no technical need to continue working with easy. For this reason, they once again investigated the market for cloud-based archive solutions at the start of the project. There were several reasons why Halfar opted for easy again at the end of this process:
“First of all, we were impressed by the complete, really well-functioning integration of easy archive in Business Central. Other providers also offered this, but we wanted a best-practice solution that was audit-proof and that we could be sure would be further developed, future-proof and innovative over the coming years.
And last but not least, easy’s price-performance ratio was also in line with our expectations. The easy archive cloud solution was the only package that fully met our expectations.”
installing easy archive in the cloud is that easy
One advantage of the cloud solution became apparent already during the installation process. Halfar’s IT department was able to download the program for starting easy archive from the Microsoft App Store and then immediately start setting up the software:
“We only needed a short appointment with an easy consultant, who helped us with the configuration.”
easy archive was initially installed in a secure environment, a sandbox, and tested as part of the ERP workshops. Once these tests had been completed successfully, the cloud archive went live. Olaf Werner is still amazed at how easy this final step was:
“All the standard functions we needed to get started were immediately available to us, meaning that nothing had to be additionally programmed or adapted by easy. We didn’t even need any training, it was all just ‘look and feel’. This way, the entire system was set up and ready for use within just a few hours.”
Further adaptations to Business Central made at a later date were also very simple:
“In the project, we created new objects and functions in Business Central that are not available as default options in easy archive. However, it is very simple to adapt easy software. We were able to implement this ourselves with a little programming, so that we can continue our archiving in easy with this new functionality. That really impressed us.”
in the end, it was clear that we had made the right choice
The cloud version of easy archive is integrated into Halfar’s operational business processes in exactly the same way as the on-premises version. In practice, this means that documents – whether in accounting, logistics or customer service – are transferred to the archive and stored there in accordance with the relevant legal requirements. In figures, this amounts to around 10,000 incoming invoices, 20,000 sales orders, 25,000 deliveries and 25,000 sales invoices per year. In addition, there are several thousand more documents resulting from email and correspondence, contracts and other processes that end up in the system.
The switch to the cloud version of the archive has also been a big change for the better for Halfar employees: Thanks to the seamless integration of the archive in Microsoft Business Central, manual data archiving is now possible directly from the user interface of the ERP system. This makes it even simpler to work with the archive in many processes because users do not have to open new windows or programs to access certain information. In the end, Olaf Werner reports that the daily users of the archive at Halfar were enthusiastic about the changeover as well.
But the IT department is also more than satisfied with this move to the cloud. Firstly, because the entire system is provided and maintained by easy software as a managed service – Olaf Werner puts the internal maintenance workload for the archive at “around one hour per month”. Secondly, Halfar also feels that by migrating to the cloud, it has found a safe haven for its data with major providers like Microsoft and easy.
Meanwhile, Halfar’s old archive is still fulfilling its purpose: Since that data has not been migrated to the new system, it will continue to run on the company’s own servers until the last documents archived there can be deleted for legal reasons.
the archive was a very important building block in our EPR implementation, and we are very happy that we found easy archive for it. it was really impressive how easy the installation was and how quickly we got the program up and running. the collaboration with easy was also great. The whole project went extremely smoothly from start to finish!
Olaf Werner,
Projektleiter IT | Halfar System GmbH