Van der Helm is a family-owned Dutch logistics provider that manages the entire supply chain for its customers, from a factory in Asia to a store or warehouse in Europe. Its business covers four areas: sea and air forwarding, customs, warehousing across three sites with a fourth opening, and transport with a fleet of around 50 trucks and its own drivers.
Every one of those areas depends on data moving between systems: customer orders into the warehouse management system (WMS), customs declarations, transport bookings and status updates for customers.
Before Frends, that data moved through custom code. "We developed using either C# or Visual Basic, on a project basis," said Victor de Bie, Business Process Manager at Van der Helm. "Each integration would be a separate project, running on a specific server."
Most of that development was done by Richard van der Helm, co-owner of the company, and a developer himself. As the number of integrations grew, so did the load of building, updating and monitoring them one by one.
Van der Helm decided to centralize its integration projects, improve monitoring and build on something future-proof. The team evaluated several platforms. Two things settled it.
The first was control. Most platforms limit you to their own connectors. Frends lets developers write custom Tasks inside the platform.
"Other platforms usually don't allow custom-made tasks. You rely on their connections and what they make possible, but you're never able to write any code yourself.", Victor de Bie, Business Process Manager at Van der Helm
The second was fit. Van der Helm is a Microsoft and .NET shop, and Frends is built on the same framework. Today about 90% of what the team builds uses standard Frends or community Tasks, and about 10% runs on custom Tasks they wrote themselves.
Frends went live in 2022. The first job was moving Helmlink, the in-house program that imported customer sales orders, purchase orders and item data from XML files into the WMS, onto the platform.
The second big project changed how the team thought about the platform. Van der Helm's fulfillment portal ran on an older low-code tool that was hard to monitor and hard to extend. The team rebuilt it with Frends as the back end, feeding orders, stock and reports to a front end that customers use directly.
"Usually we created integrations, and now we actually created software where the back end would be Frends," De Bie said.
Portals for customs, transport and forwarding followed. Each part of the business now has a customer portal that runs on Frends, with the portals themselves hosted by a German provider.
The team grew with the platform. De Bie started alone. A long-time C# developer joined him about two years ago, and three more colleagues followed. Five people now build Processes in Frends, which is why the Process count keeps climbing: around 300 today, including subprocesses.
Van der Helm took a do-it-yourself approach from day one, and De Bie is candid about what that meant. The first goal was to get off Helmlink fast, so early Processes copied the old logic step by step, writing records table by table.
"When it breaks halfway, you've got half an order in the system," he said. "That's annoying for everyone, because you need to reverse it and go back."
The team redesigned the pattern. Each Process now builds the full order as one JSON message and writes it to every table in a single database transaction. Either the whole order lands or nothing does, and a failed run can simply be retried. It's also faster, since one transaction beats dozens.
New customers can now reuse existing Processes instead of starting from scratch.
When Frends retired its legacy Agents, Van der Helm had nearly 200 Processes to move. The team installed a new .NET 8 Agent Group on a new machine and moved Processes over at its own pace. The on-premise migration took about two months.
Cloud-hosted APIs are the last step, since new endpoints mean every customer has to update its connection details. With that done, Van der Helm is now planning the move to the latest Frends version, which adds High Availability for critical Agents and the access to Frends MCP capabilities.
Van der Helm's WMS includes a scan module used by around 100 scanners in the warehouse every day. It is outdated, slow and missing features.
So De Bie is building a replacement: an Android scan app with Frends as the backbone for the system integrations, reading from the same on-premise WMS database. He uses AI coding assistants to write queries, C# and the front end. The inbound flow is finished and outbound is next. The old scanners stay available as a fallback during rollout.
He already uses AI to generate queries and code for Processes, then pastes them into Frends. The Frends MCP server will remove that copy-and-paste step.
Van der Helm keeps its warehouse systems on its own servers and uses remote access tools so staff can work from anywhere, a hybrid setup that keeps core data in-house.
Looking ahead, De Bie sees the biggest opportunity beyond structured data such as JSON, XML and APIs.
"In logistics, people spend 60 or 70 percent of their day in email. I think AI can automate those things, so people work in the operational system instead of replying to emails.", Victor de Bie, Business Process Manager at Van der Helm
His advice to other logistics companies building integrations themselves is practical. Choose a platform flexible enough that you never have to tell operations no. Think about architecture and reusability before you migrate, instead of copying what you had. And document every Process, so a new developer can find their way through a long list.
"If the operations ask for an integration that's very tricky and complex and you're not able to build it, you've chosen the wrong platform," he said. "That's why I think we made a good choice with Frends."