A secure and reliable local IT infrastructure with all the benefits and the flexibility of a cloud solution

The Be-Ge Group is the world’s oldest manufacturer for suspended driver seats and is among the leading suppliers of seats for buses, forklifts, industrial trucks, forestry and construction vehicles, trucks and railway traffic. The Swedish family-owned group of companies runs operations in Sweden, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.

Reliable operation, availability and data security 

For a manufacturing company and supplier to the automotive industry in particular, ensuring the continuous operation of many different production sites distributed throughout various countries poses certain challenges. The most crucial one with regards to IT: Safeguarding an absolutely reliable operation and securing availability without interruption while maintaining a maximum of data security. 

As a decade-long partner of this manufacturer, Konica Minolta knows its requirements quite well. With the implementation of a holistic, tailor-made IT solution, which can be rolled out throughout all production sites of the Be-Ge Group individual­ly, Konica Minolta is not just delivering hardware and software licenses, but serving the customer as a reliable long-term service partner, helping their personnel to focus their time and resources on their core business. 

From a financing perspective, despite having the solution located on site, Be-Ge is in fact only paying for the resources actually used each month, having the advantage of managed hardware at their production sites without the disadvantages of fixed hardware and software costs. This hybrid cloud solu­tion encompasses all functionalities crucial to the customer like back-up service, disaster recovery protocols and software & hardware updates and upgrades, which are key advantages for Be-Ge to be able to serve their highly demanding custom­ers even better

A single point of contact letting you focus on your business 

As a supplier for the automotive industry, Be-Ge Group has to abide to very strict delivery rules. With timing of production being highly sensitive within this supply chain, missed delivery deadlines entail significant penalty fees. Like many production companies, Be-Ge’s operations rely heavily on on-premise IT. Hence, reliable systems and IT infrastructure close to the production, build the basis for a sustainably successful busi­ness. “Konica Minolta understands our business perfectly. We cannot afford any downtime of our IT systems. To ensure this, they provided us with a cloud solution that is located on our premises but monitored and maintained centrally by Konica Minolta”, says Reza Shahrbani, IT-Manager Be-Ge Sweden. 

Through a single point of contact, Be-Ge wanted to have their complete IT needs covered by one reliable long-term partner who takes clear responsibility and truly knows where to put the emphasis to tailor a holistic solution to their exact require­ments. 

The so-called Remote-Pod concept set up by Konica Minolta provides a redundant on-premise high ability infrastructure as a service (HA IaaS) solution, where server hardware is placed at the production site of the customer for reliable offline on-site access, but is managed externally from Konica Minolta’s data centre – including a full service desk support. 

With monitoring as a service (MaaS) and back-up as a service (BaaS), the Konica Minolta experts are able to constantly monitor and back-up all customer systems at their data centre ensuring a secure operation. In case of a disaster, the customer’s operations can be up and running within a matter of hours at a different location with access to all data needed. The sources of possible IT threats can be detected early and countermeasures can be applied immediately. The package also includes licensing as a service (LaaS), giving the custom­ers full access to the necessary software in the scope they really need it. 

We cannot afford any downtime of our IT systems. To ensure this, Konica Minolta provided us with a cloud solution that is located on our premises but monitored and maintained centrally by Konica Minolta

Reza Shahrbani

IT-Manager, Be-Ge Sweden

Individual site rollout for multiple international locations 

This Remote-Pod solution was developed by Konica Minolta with the concept in mind to be able to roll it out at various in­ternational customer sites of different size individually, without the dependence on a centralised IT or software infrastructure, while still maintaining a homogenous system architecture. Hence, Be-Ge was able to implement Remote-Pods at their nine largest operations in the first step and include further pro­duction sites in individual processes afterwards. For the Be-Ge Group, it is a very valuable asset to know that they can rely on Konica Minolta’s international service and support through their service desk.