With over 230 employees, Riedel produces juices in Ede for the Dutch, Belgian, French and sometimes German markets. Until 2018, the juice producer was part of FrieslandCampina. But after a sale, the company continued independently. This unbundling was quite a challenge, including for Riedel's IT environment. In order to ensure that the unbundling would proceed quickly and smoothly, Ictivity engaged as IT partner. Tom Beam, IT manager at Riedel, talks about the collaboration.

The juice producerent made use of the IT services of FrieslandCampina for the ERP system, licenses, workstations, servers, etc. “That all had to be rebuilt when we became independent,” says Tom. And quickly too. “IT plays a significant role in our production process. This concerns industrial IT on which production runs, but also our office automation. Take the Wi-Fi network: our forklift terminals that move pallets of beverage cartons through the warehouse are connected to this. If a fault occurs in the network that causes the forklift terminals to stop, this can have consequences for the entire production process that is related to this precedes. Even to the point of a standstill in beverage production with all its (financial) consequences. From our vision to look at the cloud In order to keep IT in-house as little as possible, we wanted to quickly outsource office automation to a suitable IT partner.”

That partner became Ictivity, which works closely with Uniserver as a private cloud provider. “Besides that Ictivity de resources to tackle this project within the deadline, they had the best proposal both financially and in terms of content,” Tom explains. “We also had a good feeling after the conversations with their sales and content experts. This feeling was ultimately confirmed once we started working together.”

With no time to lose, Ictivity started the IT transformation for the office together with Riedel with the Uniserver cloud platform as a foundation. Tom: “A small part of our IT environment has remained the same, including hardware such as laptops, network and Wi-Fi equipment. Everything in terms of software, such as the Back-end for the new warehouse systems and the ERP system, Ictivity rebuilt and implemented on the Uniserver platform.” That went at breakneck speed. “After about four months from the start of the collaboration, we went live with the workstations and they were Ictivity taken into management.”

During the transition period to the new workplaces, there were both Ictivity as Riedel adoption consultants and ambassadors on site to help users work in the new environment. “Among other things, by working together on reference cards and one-pagers about the new workplaces,” Tom explains. Partly because of this, the speed of the process did not detract from the quality. “It was a challenging process with sometimes unexpected setbacks. Nevertheless, we achieved a great end result together by continuously searching for suitable solutions. I look back on it very positively.”

An important change for Riedel is that they are using the Ictivity managed IT environment and Uniserver's cloud solution act much faster on needs or changes they want to implement. “If underpart of FrieslandndCampina it took a long time before a change in the IT environment was implementedearth. With Ictivity the lines are short. With the stable Back-end we have now, we can anticipate new developments or projects more quickly, such as the implementation of Microsoft Power BI to more thatdriven to work.”

This impact has also had a positive effect on the IT sentiment among Riedel's employees. Tom: “Colleagues were sometimes negative about the ICT services due to experiences in the FrieslandCampina-time. Fortunately, we have the sentiment together with Ictivity turned around and the ICT user experience of our employees has been significantly improved.”

Now almost five years later since the start of the collaboration, Riedel is still very pleased with Ictivity as managed services partner. “They manage our helpdesk, first and second line, our network, the workplace environment and the Back-end, supported by the powerful cloudinfrastructure at Uniserver. We are very pleased with that. Since we started working with Ictivity working together we have had a minimal number of disruptions that impact our business operations. That is incredibly good.”

A partnership is how Tom approaches collaboration with Ictivity would describe. “They think along with us and periodically look at what we can improve in our environment. For example, during the time that we have been working together, we have completed a major project to improve our core network and to renew and optimally set up the most important components. We have also focused on functional further development, for example by using SharePoint and developing an intranet with which we can further improve and stimulate internal communication.”

At this moment, an important milestone lies ahead for Riedel's IT environment. "The environment that we are creating with Ictivity have put in place, has been in place for almost five years,” says Tom. “The time is coming when we either have to upgrade it or set it up again. In the coming period, we will therefore start working on a new plan to make the current environment future-proof. I want to create a new baseline that will allow us to move forward for at least another five years. For example, we have the vision to further automate, both in production and for the office. A specific wish, for example, is to use AI and chatbots to improve the service provision of the service center to automate. I would do that with Ictivity want to get started with, so that relatively simple IT problems of employees can be solved in no time and we can guarantee continuity.”