KGK chooses HiQ’s Frends as partner for system integration

In an increasingly digital world, companies are also facing digital challenges. The automotive company KGK has now turned to HiQ’s Frends as its new integration platform supplier for the group. Frends will help the organisation simplify and streamline by standardising integrations, with the ultimate goal of having Frends, in addition to APIs, as KGK’s sole solution for integrations.

“It’s fantastic that Frends are continuing to grow in Sweden and on the Swedish market! The team has done a tremendous job, and partnering up with KGK shows how integration platforms can help organisations become more efficient and see ROI at an early stage. Great work and go HiQ!”, says Sven Ivar Mørch, CEO of HiQ.

It is hard to ignore the advance of digitisation. Digitisation makes life easier in many ways, both for individuals and companies, but it also creates challenges in some cases. KGK is a company founded in 1946 by Knut-Göran Knutsson that operates in the automotive sector. The number of integrations being run increases by the day, and developments are happening at an extremely fast pace. Even hybrid environments, cloud versus on-prem, pose a challenge, and being a company in the automotive sector means having to contend with a widespread presence of legacy systems makes it more challenging to achieve simplification. Furthermore, for the work to become less person-dependent, it is necessary to work in a repeatable way. KGK needs a partner that can bring integrations together and provide quick and easy solutions to meet new customer needs and enable a faster time to market. KGK selects HiQ’s Frends as the new integration platform for the entire group. The platform supports hybrid environments and can assist with many of the challenges that occur.

“In some cases where there is no need to rely on legacy systems, we might be able to tell two systems to talk to each other, but if that is not possible, Frends will be KGK’s only option. That is our absolute goal with Frends. There is so much to do; as a company, we have many suppliers and partners with different circumstances and very different IT capabilities. Frends will enable us to modernise with minimal impact on our customers. It will be a lot better for our customers without them needing to do a lot of work. We feel confident with the team as well as the platform, and we are looking forward to what the future will bring,” says Johan Haack, CIO at KGK.

“We are delighted that KGK has chosen us. Frends is an amazing platform that can make things easier for and help organisations. The fact that KGK has chosen us after a pilot implementation shows just how good the platform is. A platform like Frends offers enormous opportunities for companies to simplify and streamline their operations,” says Jukka Rautio, Head of HiQ’s Frends.

Initially, KGK will focus mainly on different types of file movers, build APIs customised to their customers both for internal use and partners and clients, and internally modernise specific legacy systems. It is already possible to foresee major effects from decommissioning systems, reducing the load on systems and free up expensive licences, which could result in ROI on the platform relatively immediately. KGK will initially use the system at the group level in Sweden, Norway and Finland, similar businesses with similar needs. The future vision for KGK is to grow into the platform and its enormous opportunities. Frends will be used in a way that suits the business and its current and future strategies. Hyper-automation is also on the agenda, and in this regard, the platform is very much in line with the company’s future strategy. In the long term, KGK intends to automate the processes that they want to integrate today, using RPA tools and, by extension, AI. The goal is to standardise all integrations and for Frends to become KGK’s only integration solution, apart from APIs.

“We are facing some real challenges in terms of needing to act quickly and efficiently as a company, with the climate becoming more difficult to navigate as the world becomes increasingly digital. We have also seen a challenge working in the automotive industry. We need to deal with several legacy systems, including systems used both internally and by our partners, which are perhaps not of the most modern variety. We chose Frends because we recognised that our work could be drastically simplified and because we gained a great deal of confidence in them as a partner during the pilot implementation. They listened to us throughout the process, we felt very supported, and they answered all our questions. As a result, there was always a plan for how to move forward. Another positive is that the platform is relatively simple and user-friendly, with endless possibilities in terms of how far the platform can be developed,” says Urban Zetterström, IT architect at KGK.

About KGK:
KG Knutsson AB has been moving people forwards since 1946, and it is a company that believes in long-term relationships. That is why we work with strong brands and do business that benefits all parties.

We provide our suppliers with our distribution network while our customers have the best brands, all wrapped up in our product knowledge and precise distribution. We have the widest range in the sector, and on our e-commerce website autokatalogen.se our partners can find more than half a million products.

In addition to Sweden, KGK is also present in Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.