Fellowmind & Tinx. The right combination.

IT company Fellowmind employs around 2,000 talented tech and industry professionals in six European countries. They serve businesses across Europe in a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, energy, and retail. Fellowmind is a European leader in Microsoft Business Applications, Cloud Infrastructure, Data & Analytics, and the modern workplace landscape. They operate in the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and Poland, with approximately 40 offices in these countries.

Tinx has entered an official partnership with Fellowmind Finland and currently serves 3 common customers. Why did Fellowmind Finland choose Tinx as an integration partner to serve their customers? What is the experience with the Tinx E-commerce Connector and collaboration in general? Plenty of reasons to get answers to these questions during an interview with Antti Lidström, Competence Lead at Fellowmind Finland.

A short introduction

“My name is Antti Lidström. Currently, I work as a Competence Lead at Fellowmind Finland in the Business Central team. I have been with Fellowmind for 5 years now. I started as a consultant and later became a product manager. The company has grown rapidly. We began with 130 people, and now we have nearly 500 people in Finland, with 33 colleagues in my team. We started with 15 people in this team, so we have doubled the team’s staff in the past 5 years.”

“We want to build scalable solutions for our clients. As their business grows, our solutions must grow with them. They also need to be reliable. So, we need to build flexible solutions. And when we look at our clients’ customers, we need to ensure that their experience of the service they receive runs as smoothly as possible.”

For example: “If an end customer purchases a product on one of our clients’ webshops, and the customer experience is enhanced, it may mean that something has changed in the ordering process. As an ERP partner, we need to adjust this ordering process in Business Central to ensure that end customers have a better ordering experience than before. So, in that way, we are constantly improving.

Fellowmind in contact with Tinx

“About 1.5 years ago, we conducted online research on various connectors and compared various solutions in the market. We quickly found that there were not many flexible solutions. With the Tinx Connectors, we are very pleased with the different data flows from the webshop to Business Central and the flexibility of the connector.”

Microsoft Dynamics NAV or Dynamics 365 Business Central?

“We recommend our clients to opt for Business Central implementations because NAV is becoming outdated, and at some point, it will need to be upgraded to Business Central anyway. Business Central also offers many more different features compared to NAV. And it is a more scalable solution.”

“The Business Central SaaS version is much easier to implement than NAV. Additionally, the costs are relatively low. For small and medium-sized businesses, it is a great platform to use. It is also easier for us to implement than NAV, as Business Central SaaS is always up-to-date in terms of various features.”

“The primary webshop platform that our clients use is Shopify. Some of them also use WooCommerce. Regarding Shopify, we also looked at the native Microsoft Shopify Connector. This is not an option for our clients because it is not sufficiently scalable. You can customize it to some extent, but not as much as needed to meet our clients’ requirements. There are so many business processes that need to be handled that the standard connector simply cannot cover them all. For example, retrieving Shopify pickup points IDs. Although it is super easy to implement, it doesn’t work when changing the business processes.”

“Fellowmind chose Tinx mainly for flexibility and scalability. We can adapt processes as per the customer’s requirements and align with best practices. We work on technical aspects and aim to provide the best possible customer experience. We’ve combined these aspects to create the best solution that works for customers using the technology we employ.”

Integration Flows of the Tinx Connector in practice

“In practice, at our mutual customers, the Tinx Connector is primarily used for basic order flows and configuring product mappings. For example, at Puhdistamo, we pass the picking point ID to our end shift connector to relay that information to the nShift portal, ensuring precise knowledge of the pickup point. This process works smoothly and efficiently. We also send tracking codes from the end shift connector to the Shopify webshop. The integration connects various platforms. Additionally, inventory management is customized because Puhdistamo has a webshop section within the warehouse location. They have one large warehouse serving both B2B customers and B2C webshop customers, effectively using two zones to allocate inventory within a single warehouse.”

“We also encountered challenges related to product shelf life, which didn’t align well with reservations in Business Central. To address this, we optimized and created tight configurations for the picking process. Puhdistamo offers various packaging options for its products, such as boxes and individual units, each with a different expiration date. It’s like solving a large puzzle, but we managed to find a good solution!”

“If a customer is advanced in Business Central, they can troubleshoot issues themselves. We always see errors that are human-made, so it really helps if the customer can easily track in the error log where the error is coming from and resolve it very quickly. After the fix, the synchronization works again, and the customer doesn’t need to call an external consultant like me. It really saves money to fix small errors on their own. It also helps the customer understand what causes errors and why.”

“We have a good collaboration. For the two projects, Projecta and Prima Pet Premium, I was more in the background, but for Puhdistamo, I worked with your consultants, Sam and Kasper. In the first project, we learned a lot from each other, for example, what is possible in Business Central and Shopify. It was an eye-opener for both parties. Unit of Measure, for instance, is a feature that was added to the Connector since it was processed during one of these projects. It’s great to see that this feature will eventually help Tinx as well.”

“Flexibility, monitoring, and the fact that you can easily customize it to the customer’s business processes, like handling different phases. If you want to send something to the customer, you can create a powerful app or flow to make it happen. Actually, there’s not much you can’t do when thinking about the business process itself. Because you have all the necessary information to start powerful automation from there, and what you want to have there and scale it process-wide. Lack of imagination is the only limitation. Usually, integration is the only bottleneck, but in this case, I haven’t seen that.”

Can you recommend Tinx to another company?

“If you’re struggling with webshop integrations, then Tinx is the solution to consider.”