The Dutch plastics group Vink Group has its Axapta cared for and maintained by Columbus IT Partner and TDC Hosting in a total outsourcing of application and platform. This means that instead of Vink's own IT personnel taking care of running, the company can now use its resources on supporting and developing the business.
“When we ran the system ourselves we had many scheduled and unscheduled crashes and interruptions. This meant dissatisfied users and lots of wasted time whilst waiting for assistance from the outside. Now that the server is at TDC Hosting, we have already enjoyed a considerable improvement in operational stability, close to 100% – and should things go wrong, the experts are almost on top of the machines,” says Bo Florin.ERP operations outsourced
”The Nordic Axapta solution was run from our department in Randers, but we quickly realised that we were unable to ourselves operate an even bigger system,” Bo Florin tells us.
“Just a little thing like different working hours in each country proved to be a problem. It's not good enough if a German employee cannot obtain support early in the morning or late in the evening because the office hours of our internal support department are from 8 am to 4 pm. As a result, we had more and more dissatisfied users.”
Bo Florin began to look round for providers who could document positive operational solutions on the Axapta platform. This resulted in an operating agreement with TDC Hosting and Columbus IT Partner, after which Axapta was to smoothly roll out the then approximately 200 users to 650 users before the start of 2006.
Releasing energy
Implementation started in January 2005, and the first five companies went live as early as 1 April. Bo Florin explains the smoothness of the process saying that TDC Hosting and Columbus IT Partner acted as a single supplier in this process and were both fully involved.
Experience from the first seven months has been positive. Vink's own IT staff have freed up energy and can now focus on far more business-oriented matters.
About Vink Group
The Vink Group is Europe's leading supplier of plastics to industry, building and for advertising purposes. Its product range consists of plastic semi-finished goods such as rods, tubes, boards, films, profiles, ventilation components and plastic piping systems. In Denmark, Vink has turnover of EUR 30 million and employs a staff of 111. Over the years the Vink Group has grown to a point where its turnover is now EUR 259 million and has a staff of 1000 in 14 different European countries. The group is part of the listed Dutch group Kendrion.