When we went the extra mile to solve a critical infrastructure issue for Krogab, the hospitality supplier saw a passion for service that mirrors its own.
Whether they know it or not, thousands of people use Krogab’s products each day. For more than 30 years, the company has been providing juices, coffees and waffles to hotels, universities, leisure centres, cruise ships and more. Its offering has expanded to machinery, services and premium coffee and breakfast items, and its client list includes international brands such as Hilton, Village Hotels and Leonardo Hotels.
In 2024 the Cheshire-based company was acquired by a Finnish group, with Kristian von Bonsdorff coming onboard as Managing Director. We’ve been working closely with Kristian ever since.
When the purchase was completed, Kristian recalls that everything happened quite quickly. The first priority was to get daily activity running in the new company as fast as possible, fulfilling orders and invoicing the customers.
Sage 200 was already in place as the business’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, but with a backlog of transactions, the new owners needed to get things up and running at speed.
Once things had settled, Kristian and the team felt it was time to review the IT setup at the company. As the Sage 200 partner providing their Sage 200 system and Microsoft 365 services, we spent time working with them to review what was possible.
While the conversations around their ERP have largely explored the capabilities of the solution and what value additional modules and addons can bring, it was in fact an unexpected incident that helped us prove our worth to the new owners.
The rural area of Middlewich, where Krogab’s offices are based, was hit by a freak spike in the local electricity network, which took out the company’s power.
That afternoon, the team contacted Thinc, and we dispatched two of our managed services team to them immediately. We identified an issue with Krogab’s uninterruptible power supply (UPS) unit that could cause damage to their server in the event of another spike. The next morning, we delivered and installed a temporary UPS unit, with a permanent device in place the next day.
“Thinc really took time and made effort to help us,” reflects Kristian. “The team sat until 9pm at our office and investigated all possible options how to fix it. For us, this was a business-critical problem, but Thinc understood it and everything they could and even more to help us.
“If we hadn’t got gotten that help immediately, our business would have been stuck for at least two days.”
Since then, Krogab has renewed its Sage 200 licence and continues to call on Thinc for advice on its IT services. The biggest advantage of this, Kristian tells us, is the ability to outsource specialist IT tasks such as configuring communication systems or its network. Employing its own full-time IT person would not be cost-effective for the way Krogab operates – far more value can be derived from using a partner who can step in to fill the gap.
“It’s super important to have a partner that has all areas of expertise – it makes our work efficient because we can then concentrate on what we are best at,” he says.
During his career, Kristian has worked at large enterprises and SMEs alike, with deep experience of collaborating with IT service providers of all sizes. This gives him a broad perspective on the value they can bring.
“For the first 15 years of my career I worked with quite big companies in, in manufacturing and IT technology and logistics roles, at that time managing very big IT partners. I then moved to smaller businesses 10 to 11 years ago, where of course you live in a totally different reality,” he explains.
“You can’t call the likes of IBM to help, as you won’t be able to afford it. So, it then becomes much more critical to find a good IT partner, whether it’s for the infrastructure or the systems you are running. It also becomes critical to find the right systems because some are just too big, too expensive or too complicated to for small companies.
“So, in that field, I’ve looked at many different partners in Finland, Sweden and now the UK over the past decade, particularly for this company size and business setting. I have to say that, in making that comparison, I have a very favourable view of Thinc.
“If I hadn’t been happy, I would have changed to somebody else!”
We’re delighted to have made Kristian happy – and hope to make him, and his colleagues at Krogab, even happier as our relationship continues.
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