Nurminen Logistics, founded in 1886, offers high-quality logistics services, such as environmentally friendly international rail transport services, cargo handling, multimodal transportation, and forwarding services to its customers.
With the help of Frends iPaas and Frends integration experts, the Finnish company wanted to improve its business viability from a data management perspective and build a solid basis for future digitalization according to the company's strategy, such as a new customer portal.
"We wanted to choose a secure and multi-cloud platform as maintaining one's data onsite was burdensome. Moreover, we chose Frends iPaaS for being a platform-as-a-service, and cost-efficient and flexible to use."
Petri Luurila, Chief Information Officer at Nurminen Logistics
As a starting point, Nurminen Logistics had a complex integration architecture with many overlapping systems, including some legacy systems. In addition, incidents took a lot of work to locate and resolve. Finally, there were too many moving parts and a need for better documentation.
"The overall integration work was no longer either agile or lean. As we don't have in-house integration resources, we needed to find a technology and a partner that allows more agile and flexible development," says Petri Luurila, Chief Information Officer at Nurminen Logistics.
Luurila had worked with Frends iPaaS in his previous role as Group CIO of Silta and Administer Group. Hence, he was familiar with the benefits of the Finnish hybrid integration platform.
Nurminen Logistics chose cloud-based Frends iPaaS as its integration platform to build a more cost-efficient, reliable, and controllable integration architecture.
The cooperation with Frends started in 2020, after which integrations have steadily been centralized in Frends iPaaS. With the help of Frends, Nurminen Logistics consolidated three integration platforms into one.
The data is securely stored in Azure Cloud and maintained by Frends. Luurila appreciates the reliable cooperation with Frends, which has allowed Nurminen Logistics gradually decrease the number of old systems.
"Frends thoroughly understands our needs and always responds to them quickly. With the support of Frends' experts and technology, we constantly face fewer problems, can operate more cost-effectively and reliably, and run development in a sprint model. Without forgetting strategic planning, we are ready to continue our well-started digital roadmap as planned."
For Nurminen Logistics, Frends iPaaS is the backbone of the data flow. In addition, the modern integration platform allows continuous future development, such as utilizing AI, APIs, and BPA on the way to hyper-automation. In the following years, Nurminen Logistics's strategy is to increase the digital user experience for customers by giving them access to customers up-to-date information online.
"Frends is the reliable core of all data – as a digital integration hub. For any development scenario, such as our customer portal, we need Frends to gather data from different backend systems. Moreover, it can help us develop the ecosystem thinking in the traditional logistics field, in which sharing data would benefit all parties in the future," describes Luurila.