“We get your products moving, whether in Austria or anywhere else in Europe.“
This is the mission of the former ÖBB subsidiary Q Logistics, which as of 1 January 2020 became part of the German investment company Mutares. The former ”general cargo and warehousing“ business unit of ÖBB-Holding and Quehenberger Logistics has been doing business under the new name of BEXity – an amalgam of the words ”flexibility“ and ”agility“ that also reflects the company‘s tradition and values. And yet, there were much bigger challenges than finding a new name: the entire existing IT infrastructure and with it the entire EDI system had to be removed from the former ÖBB architecture and transferred to a new environment. All that had to be done during ongoing operations, with as little client involvement as possible and on a tight schedule.
EDI for BEXity right on track
”Since we were dealing with time-critical processes involving a high data volume, we realized early on that we needed a true EDI expert with in-depth expertise and the human resources needed for this comprehensive and complex project,“ said Robert Blum, the director of IT at BEXity. The company chose to work with EDITEL, and they focused all their efforts on this monumental task. What made this task particularly challenging was mostly the myriad digital processes, which go well beyond the traditional ”order2cash“ procedure. At a logistics company of this size, many different data formats and processes, e.g., transport orders, consignment notes and invoices, are handled every day. And all these involve business partners who rely on many different communication channels. In total, approximately 250 EDI partners had to be migrated to the new environment on a very tight schedule following a strict security protocol. At the same time, 20 new partners had to be connected to the system. Another difficulty was the surrounding IT infrastructure that is a prerequisite for all EDI operations: among other things, five different locations and several IT systems had to be merged, which required a significant amount of coordination with other IT service providers who also worked on this project. In general, this was a very challenging task. That is why ”EDITEL was determined, from the very beginning, to manage the migration within the tight schedule without jeopardizing ongoing operations at BEXity in any way,“ said Gerd Marlovits, the CEO of EDITEL.
Moving things along
EDITEL successfully completed all necessary tasks by the project deadline. This meant that in just under nine months, everything that needed to happen did happen: moving an entire EDI system from one place to another without affecting ongoing operations in any way. It’s worth pointing out that due to the pandemic, none of the involved persons met in person during the entire course of the project. This means that all business and organizational decisions were made during virtual meetings. According to EDITEL project manager Jan Reichetzeder, it was ”mostly thanks to the continuous and good collaboration with our client“ that everything went so smoothly despite the difficult circumstances. This was also key for the client side: ”EDITEL took the initiative to manage communication processes with our EDI business partners and the previous ÖBB service providers, which turned out to be extremely useful for everybody involved,“ said Robert Blum. ”As the EDI service provider of choice, we reached all project goals, which established a solid basis for future projects with BEXity,“ said Gerd Marlovits, who looks forward to continuing on this high-speed journey.
