Radium Foam

About Radium Foam

The Vita Group is a manufacturer of flexible polyurethane foams, Talalay Latex, and flooring products with production facilities in the UK and EU. Radium Foam is part of the Comfort division of the group with production based in the Netherlands. Their production planning and engineering take a front seat to sales and marketing, with consistency and quality being the top priorities from raw materials to packing and shipping. 

To meet the DMS 4.0 deadline (newest Dutch Customs platform), Radium Foam needed to urgently change their existing customs solutions software. Their existing solution was unable to support the transition to DMS, which left Radium Foam facing the possibility of pausing international trade. This would have been hugely detrimental to their business.

Customs clearance software is essential for any business that wants to import or export goods across borders. However, many companies offering these solutions are unable to keep up with changing country legislations, leaving their customers without a viable solution to process declarations. Joland Beerens, IT Demand Manager at The Vita Group partnered with ECS International to continue trading through the DMS transition.

“We knew we had a hard deadline of going live on the 31^st January, and C4T were very quick to send across a quote and explain the integration with ECS.”

Joland Beerens, IT Demand Manager, The Vita Group

Partnering With ECS International: The Key to Radium Foam's Customs Challenges

ECS International BV (ECS) offer a wide range of products and services for application integration and data communication, with reliable, flexible and scalable solutions for organisations looking to integrate systems together using secure electronic data exchange. ECS assisted Radium in looking for a new partner, and CEO, Ben Rinkel, reached out to Customs4trade (C4T) after previous conversations about partnerships. After a discovery call with C4T, ECS recommended C4T to Radium as the best provider for their customs challenges. The native Dutch speakers in C4T were a huge benefit to Joland and his team, making it easy and quick to communicate and get the work done.

The urgency of the January 31st deadline meant the approval for C4T’s customs declaration software CAS had to be done quickly, which vastly sped up the process. Radium Foam became the fasted onboarded customer in C4T history!

Another huge benefit to the speed of the onboarding was the partnership with ECS; from the moment ECS explained the CAS solution from C4T, the demonstration of our track record gave all stakeholders a lot of confidence. All parties lived up to their promises, resulting in a very successful go live of the project.

“Props to ECS are deserved, they set up the API integration fast and with complete professionalism.”

Joland Beerens, IT Demand Manager, The Vita Group

Don't Let Customs Changes Slow Your Business Down

From the initial enquiry call in November, files were ready for testing. The first files were sent through in mid-December and it was clear from the start that if the data is right in CAS, customs documents are processed automatically, with intervention only needed if an error was flagged!

The automated process is less worrying for the shipping department who didn’t have, nor need, the customs knowledge to process a declaration. “We found we had to feed some additional data into CAS, running a few satellite apps in our ERP system, we could easily modify and add additional fields to send to the ECS platform for Data Integration (X4Connect) to map into CAS.” Says Joland.

ECS integrated fields into the API, with flexibility from all parties to help get the transactional data into CAS. From mid-December to January there was little for the Radium Foam team to do; ECS continued with the API integration behind the scenes on their SaaS integration system. The onboarding team at C4T were instrumental to the project, sharing knowledge with both ECS and Radium Foam and addressing any issues immediately. Jens was able to visit the Radium Foam team in person which really helped the team build confidence in using CAS.

While the testing commenced in early January, their data also ran through their old system so Joland and his team could see the difference immediately. There were some tweaks needed during the testing stage which were picked up on regular calls between the three companies and addressed straight away. “We were ready for go live one week early!” Says Joland.

“Jens was there all morning on the go live date, checking flows and identifying ways to address any issues that may have occurred.”

Joland Beerens, IT Demand Manager, The Vita Group

A Strong Partnership

From the first call to the go live date, Radium Foam were up and running within five weeks, making this the fastest customer onboarded in C4T history! The first successful declaration was sent through CAS long before the deadline of January 31st.

Thanks to the ECS SaaS Data integration platform X4Connect, the integration between the Radium ERP system and C4T was done very rapidly, as ECS had the knowledge for the systems in their application.

Working together as equals on this project rather than customer service providers sped up the project. All parties were working towards the same goal – to migrate Radium Foam over to DMS quickly and successfully to keep their goods moving.

“The onboarding team don’t disappear once you’ve gone live, they are still involved in the early stages, sharing their knowledge rather than being handed straight over to the support team.”

Joland Beerens, IT Demand Manager, The Vita Group

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