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Morssinkhof Groep is a family of companies comprising Morssinkhof Infra, Brinkman brick center, and Tuinvisie. Priding themselves on helping enhance the streetscape and public environment in the Netherlands, they are suppliers of concrete civil engineering and ornamental paving products, as well as paving stones and facing bricks. While Morssinkhof Infra supplies an extensive range of concrete products, Brickman brick center supplies paving bricks, decorative paving, facing bricks, and roof tiles, whereas Tuinvisie is a manufacturer, importer, and supplier of a wide range of garden hardware.
One of the biggest challenges that the Morssinkhof Groep faced was a fragmented IT landscape, wherein several applications were loosely linked by vendor-owned software. Eventually, their attempts at using other software solutions to integrate these scattered applications led to a black box scenario, which refers to a lack of transparency or interpretability of processes. This meant that every time there were errors, Morssinkhof never had clear visibility into the source of the issue and had to rely on their software vendor to resolve their challenges. This led them to change their application integration strategy.
Looking for a central integration solution that was transparent, user-friendly, and could serve as a single source of truth, Morssinkhof discovered the Alumio integration platform. The flexibility, visibility, and scalability of the API-led, low-code integration platform that Alumio provided gave them the agility that they were looking for to be adaptive in the rapidly evolving SaaS and cloud app landscape.
Using the Alumio cloud-native integration platform, Morssinkhof started swiftly integrating its application landscape. This included connecting their ERP system (Microsoft Dynamics Finance & Operations), e-commerce platform (Shopware), PIM & MDM system (SRC), and most importantly, their decorative paving industry software called Smart Stone by Troublefree.
Apart from helping Morssinkhof swiftly integrate these applications, Alumio provides a user-friendly, low-code web interface to create, manage, and monitor all these integrations, which both developers and non-technical business users can easily interpret and collaborate on. This gives Morssinkhof full visibility into all the data flows exchanged between all integrated applications. Additionally, as an API-driven solution, Alumio provides the flexibility to seamlessly connect any new application(s) to existing integrated systems without losing data integrity.
Alumio has helped make integrations simple for Morssinkhof to the point that they can now train their internal resources to govern their integrations via the integration platform. However, for more complex and specialized integration challenges, Morssinkhof has chosen to work with Inteqrate, Alumio partners and integration specialists. Inteqrate helps Morssinkhof build special customizations, optimize workflows, and leverage the Alumio platform effectively.
With Alumio, Morssinkhof automates processes and real-time data exchange across all integrated systems. This includes the exchange of optimized product images (from the PIM system), real-time stock (from ERP to e-commerce), order processing (from e-commerce to ERP), prices (updated every day), and much more.
Morssinkhof has also built its own Alumio Storage in order to prevent constant calls to the ERP system and to improve its performance. Needing to perform a real-time stock check on around 5000 products every 15 minutes, they noticed a delay within their ERP system. This was solved by making an intermediate table that processes everything according to the orders from the webshop in order to compare recent changes. Another crucial task that was automated via Alumio was the automatic resizing of product pictures before they were sent to the webshop.
Alumio has become the focal point of Morssinkhof’s application ecosystem, “like the spider in the web,” as they like to call it. Instead of having 25 scattered applications, Morssinkhof uses Alumio to connect and synchronize them all seamlessly. Now, any application with an API that wants to link with Morssinkhof's systems has to go through Alumio. Their future plans with Alumio include building integrations with their ATS/HR systems (also on Microsoft Dynamics 365), their time-tracking system, and a possible connection with a data warehouse for advanced analytics. As a result, Alumio has emerged as a core driver in Morssinkhof’s larger digital transformation journey.
