Story Highlights
The ERP solution provided by CCE brings business agility to their food distribution customers for over 25 years.
The Babelway platform also brings value to CCE because it is constantly updated with latest standard and technologies. For example, they can now already offer PEPPOL.
In today’s ever changing business world, a company’s ability to adapt and be flexible is key to its success. Claerhout Computer Engineering (CCE) knows this very well. They leverage many tools, including Babelway, to offer the best ERP solution to their customers. We spoke with their Implementation Manager, Koen Brackenier, about how Babelway business agility to their customers.
CCE has offered an ERP solution for over 25 years, with a prominent presence in the food distribution industry.They commonly interact with large companies like Carrefour, Delhaize, LIDL, and more. Babelway is often involved in projects requiring an EDIFACT solution to complement their ERP system. From day one, CCE was already seeing the value Babelway had on their EDIFACT implementations for their customers.
“We came into contact with Babelway 3 years ago… When we heard that Babelway offered an ‘in the cloud’ platform on which CCE can do a lot of the EDIFACT setup work itself, we were triggered to strengthen the relationship between CCE and Babelway.”
Before the partnership with Babelway, CCE experienced the impact of the additional 3rd party providers of EDIFACT for its project timelines and CCE’s post-production control of data. Also, facilitating their ERP’s XML integration with external systems added more complexity to each project.
With Babelway, they immediately saw how it could improve their product offering. “With Babelway, the extra work was no longer needed. We could generate our XML, send it to the Babelway system, and done.” Babelway allowed their ERP to easily connect to any of their customer’s business partners.
“I was the first at CCE to use the platform. Within a couple of days, I was able to setup a full EDI flow, receiving order files and sending Invoice and Despatch advice files without the need of Babelway support. It was really cool.”
Koen is foremost a business manager. He focuses on business flows, integration best practices, and ensuring that B2B integration flows smoothly for his customers. Yet, even though he wasn’t a developer, Koen was able to build three document flows within a week. He described how the relationship between CCE and Babelway helped reduce the amount of work and time required to get their customers setup on EDIFACT. The speed and universal support allowed them to become implementation rock stars. They consistently receive happy feedback from their customers about how easy and fast their ERP implementation and B2B integration occur. “We have never had a situation in which a technology was not available on the Babelway platform.”
“We have a full view of what really happens. We have full control of the movement and translation of files.”
The ability to resolve errors easily allowed them to offer exceptional service to their ERP customers. They have full control, can quickly look at what is wrong and solve it themselves. With this level of control, their customers know that they can count on CCE to solve any issue quickly. This responsiveness is crucial in the food distribution industry. If a Despatch advice is blocked, it must be solved in minutes or else the customer risks the goods being undeliverable. “We are fully confident that we can use Babelway under tight deadlines… CCE can deliver a good service for EDI to our customers.”
“Babelway offers us all possibilities we need today, but also in the future.”
Another essential point to CCE’s business continuity is the ability to adapt to changing standards and technologies in the future. Partnering with Babelway, Koen feels confident in their ability to support new technologies as they are developed. Most recently, Babelway’s support of PEPPOL has already added value to CCE customers, allowing them to enable the newest trend of B2B and B2G integration. Not only can CCE offer a solid ERP and EDIFACT solution, they now have the ability to support PEPPOL for their customers and prospects because of Babelway’s development.
We look forward to a continued growing partnership with Koen and the EDI team at CCE. Together we shape the future of B2B integration.