Scherenbostel Industrial Estate

Industriehof Scherenbostel („I-Hof“) is a German family-run business headquartered in Wedemark, near Hanover. Since its foundation in 1975, the company has specialised in supplying the industrial sector, original equipment manufacturers and specialist retailers with spare parts, wear parts and components for their manufacture. The company’s focus is on agricultural and municipal machinery, as well as viticulture and construction machinery.

The success story of Industriehof Scherenbostel began as a business selling spare parts for agricultural machinery on Heinrich Rodenbostel’s farm. The farm eventually evolved into a distribution centre for agricultural machinery supplied by the Danish company Alfred Bilstein A/S. Today, the company is run by the second generation of the family, Heinrich-Wilhelm Rodenbostel, and employs more than 70 staff. Through continuous product and process optimisation, Industriehof develops components tailored to customer needs for the development of new machinery. The high product quality, the breadth of the product range and the prompt availability of parts are further strengths of the company.

Digital archiving has played a key role at Industriehof for many years now, as the company needed to find a system capable of archiving data from both the new ERP software (IBS Enterprise) and the old stock management software.

The old stock management software was the biggest cause for concern, as there is no longer any support available for it, given that the relevant software company had completely disappeared from the market some time ago. Invoices have been digitally archived and stored in duplicate using a DMS (SpyView) since 2007. Previous tax audits had gone smoothly, so the provision of digital data was postponed until the next possible tax audit in 2008. The starting point was therefore clear: a system had to be found that could be seamlessly integrated into the existing system landscape.

Possible solutions from various providers were examined, but we have not yet been able to find the ideal system for us. We contacted our ERP system provider, International Business Systems (IBS) in Hamburg, in spring 2008 and were invited to a GDPdU client workshop in April/May. During the client workshop, the legal requirements under the GDPdU and the resulting obligations for businesses were explained in detail.

IBS had been looking into this issue for some time and, together with Mr Liese (hsp), presented the Opti.List package developed by hsp. The solution presented stood out for its remarkably short implementation time, minimal support requirements and high adaptability to different system environments. We were very impressed by the functionalities demonstrated. We had found the ideal system for our needs. By now, time was of the essence, as the tax inspectors had been in touch and wished to carry out the due tax audit, taking into account the provision of digital data.

Case study by Sven Slowak, IT project manager at the company