Industry: Machinery Distribution & Support
Operations: 39 companies across 4 continents
Status: 2,500+
Customer since: 2022
Use case: Hybrid System Integration, Monitoring, Digital Efficienct
With a history that stretches back to a blacksmith’s shop in 1786, Royal Reesink has evolved into an international leader in distributing and supporting equipment for agriculture, material handling, turfcare, logistic solutions and construction. Royal Reesink delivers innovation, local service, and sustainable practices to thousands of businesses worldwide.
Over the past decade, Royal Reesink has grown rapidly from a few companies based in the Netherlands and Belgium to a group of 39 operating in 12 countries across four continents. As a result, its IT landscape evolved into a complex, distributed ecosystem.
The mix of legacy and modern applications, multiple ERPs, and diverse integration needs made standardization and scalability essential for continued growth and operational efficiency.
For an organization whose core business is not software development, managing integrations across multiple systems—cloud-based and on-premise—had become a time-consuming and fragmented task.
This is the story of how Royal Reesink adopted a low-code approach with Frends iPaaS to modernize operations and enhance data flow across its ecosystem.
Royal Reesink, a leading distributor of agricultural, turfcare, construction, logistic solutions and material-handling equipment, operates over 39 companies across 4 continents. Despite its scale, it’s not a tech company.
With minimal in-house developers, it faced a familiar challenge: integrating legacy and modern systems across multiple business units without a large IT department or internal development resources.
“We're not a software company. We needed a solution that even non-developers could manage — and that's one of the main reasons we chose Frends,"
Marc Shoenmaker, Enterprise Applications Architect
Before Frends, integrations were a patchwork of point-to-point connections, FTP servers, outdated macros, and black-box legacy solutions like Automate.
Visibility was minimal, flexibility low, and adapting integrations for new companies or changing regulations took months.
One clear example was a daily file that took four hours to process — and had critical financial inaccuracies because they couldn't inspect or validate the data flows.
“We found out invoices were going out three weeks late, simply because we were pulling the wrong date field from Navision,” Marc says. “With Frends, we could read and change the exact logic — now it takes ten seconds."
Frends’ low-code, Azure-native platform gave Royal Reesink what they needed:
Frends became the standard layer across their systems. Whether it’s OEM partners with bespoke .XML schemas, invoice automation in Belgium, or feeding stock info between warehouses and Navision — Frends is or will be the common thread, as more migrations and rollouts are happening.
Using Frends, Royal Reesink built a series of integration processes connecting its various systems, streamlining data flow, and gaining control.
“From day one, Frends gave us transparency,” Marc explains. “We could finally see how our processes were running, what was working, and where we needed to intervene.”
The low-code environment also allowed Royal Reesink’s IT team to deploy new connections quickly, eliminating the backlog of manual tasks and custom-coded workarounds.
With Frends, Royal Reesink can now benefit from:
"Frends is the least of our problems,” says Marc. “It’s everything around it — organizational readiness, process design — that takes time. With Frends, we adapt fast and stay transparent.”
Royal Reesink is on a journey to unify its operations under a modern Microsoft Dynamics 365 stack. Frends is the backbone of that integration strategy.
When a new company is acquired, they follow the “Reesink Distribution Model,” which includes onboarding via Frends to enforce standardized, efficient, and secure operations.
In the future, Frends will also support:
"If we acquire a new company, the goal is to integrate it within weeks, not months. Frends is what makes that possible." — Hans Jager, Integration Lead and Frends Champion
Frends helped Royal Reesink move from fragile, developer-dependent integrations to a platform they can own, scale, and trust — with full visibility.
Whether it’s improving cash flow, avoiding RPA costs, or making OEM partnerships more seamless, Frends is more than just a tool — it’s their new standard for integration.