When a Belgian truck specialist outgrew its tangle of PHP, Bash and PowerShell scripts, it didn't hire more developers or bring in an integrator. It chose Frends, did the migration itself, and now has every system connected: on one platform, visible in one dashboard, running even when the internet goes down.
.png)
Braem Group is a Belgian specialist in everything trucks. Across five locations, the group sells and services MAN and Mercedes-Benz vehicles, runs an independent service facility, holds the regional MAN dealership concession, operates a spare parts division supplying customers across Europe, Africa, Asia and South America, and rents trucks on short- and long-term contracts.
With around 300 employees and multiple business units, the group runs several ERP systems, a dealer management system, Salesforce for CRM, a customer-facing website, a logistics operation and a growing e-commerce channel for spare parts. Every one of those systems needs to talk to the others.
For a long time, that conversation happened through a sprawl of scripts.
Integration spaghetti, and a truck that wouldn't go online
Ignace Quaghebeur, IT Manager at Braem Group, had been running the company's IT systems for 15 years. In the early days, he could hold everything in his head. But as the business grew and more people joined the team, the cracks started to show.
"We had a multitude of different solutions and it became a spaghetti. If you want to solve issues, you first had to look into the documentation, find out which server it was coming from, and before you knew it, you were busy for days just to find out why a truck wasn't on the internet or a picture was wrong."
Ignace Quaghebeur, IT Manager, Braem Group
The clearest example was a used truck going on sale. For a truck to appear on the website with correct pricing, pictures and a video, four entirely separate flows had to succeed simultaneously: an XML from the operations ERP pushed via PHP and FTP; a picture upload driven by a PowerShell and Bash script combination; a price export from the financial ERP via a Progress application; and a video check via a hardcoded URL.
If any one of them failed, the truck simply didn't appear, and figuring out which one had failed meant knowing PHP, Bash and PowerShell, digging through logs on different servers and working through the puzzle from scratch.
The team tried consolidating the scripts onto a single server to at least have one place to look. It helped, but it didn't solve the underlying problem.
The moment that made the case
The tipping point wasn't a crisis. It was watching Salesforce get implemented.
When Braem onboarded Salesforce, the implementation partner used an integration platform — built on WSO2 — to connect it to the rest of the stack. Ignace watched the integrations get managed cleanly, errors surfaced through alerts, and the whole thing stay under control. It was the first time he'd seen a different way of working.
The team started looking for something similar. They defined their requirements: one place for all integrations, full visibility into both errors and successful runs, and — critically — local resilience. If the internet went down, integrations between on-site systems had to keep running.
Why Frends: hybrid deployment and the right level of code
Braem evaluated three iPaaS vendors at a similar price point. Two things made Frends stand out.
First, hybrid deployment. With Frends, local integrations keep running regardless of internet connectivity. Braem has already experienced that scenario, and Frends just worked.
Second, low-code rather than no-code. A purely no-code approach would have been too restrictive for a team that came from scripting and wanted to stay close to the logic. Frends gave them a visual process modelling environment, backed by C# when they needed to go deeper.
"If your internet fails, all the local integrations just keep on working. We had that situation already. It just works."
Ignace Quaghebeur, IT Manager, Braem Group
Built in-house, from day one
Braem decided not to use a system integrator. The team agreed with Frends to work directly and kicked off with a structured proof of concept: three real integrations, handed to a Frends developer, with the output documented so Braem could learn from the patterns. Ten days later they had a reference they're still using today.
William, who manages Salesforce integrations on the team, migrated the existing Salesforce-to-ERP connection, previously built on Java services hosted externally, requiring four or five different tools just to deploy or edit a service, to Frends in about a week, working independently from the documentation.
"We unified all of those tools into one platform. That makes it much easier for us as IT to manage those processes."
William Rasschaert, IT Application Administrator, Braem Group
What changed: one platform, one way of working
The most significant shift wasn't a specific integration. It was the standardisation of how the team works.
"The biggest impact is that everybody is working in exactly the same way. It doesn't matter who is doing the integration — it's done in business process modelling, it's in C#, and it's visible on one platform. That's a huge gain."
Ignace Quaghebeur, IT Manager, Braem Group
Beyond consistency, the dashboard changed how the team understands their own systems. Seeing all successful integrations — not just errors — showed which API calls were happening most frequently, revealed redundant calls that could be consolidated, and helped size the infrastructure correctly.
It also opened up integrations they wouldn't have attempted before. Braem is now building a direct OCI integration between a customer's ERP, the Braem website, and the internal logistics flow — allowing a customer to order from their own ERP and have the order flow automatically through to Braem's warehouse and delivery process.
"We wouldn't have dared doing that without a platform like Frends. And it's been easier than we thought it would be," says Ignace.
What's next: Salesforce as the single master, a PIM at the centre
Braem has moved away from a multi-master data model. Salesforce is now the single CRM master, feeding all other systems through Frends. Remaining scripts — the ones that just run quietly in the background — are being migrated progressively.
The next big project is a Product Information Management (PIM) system — the missing layer between the dealer management system and the company's customer-facing channels.
The PIM will centralise article data, power websites in nine or ten languages, manage technical documentation and enable upselling logic. Frends will sit at the centre of it, connecting the PIM to every other system in the landscape.
The team is also starting to explore using Frends to connect internal AI tools — routing questions to AI bots and feeding answers back into Salesforce — a use case they see as natural next step once the process connectors are established.
"Frends keeps you in the driver's seat. You get an overview, you get control — and it sits at the centre of the IT infrastructure. Every application runs around Frends," says Ignace.