20 years of Cadran: highlights and plans for the future

This year, on 31 December we will be toasting not just the new year, but also Cadran’s 20-year anniversary. Back then, the founders had the ambition of expanding to around 25 employees, but we now have 55 and many, many great customers and we continue to grow. We have some great new plans as well. We can look back on the past 20 years with pride and joy are very much looking forward to the next 20!

6 headstrong IT specialists start Cadran

It all started in 1997 with six IT specialists who thought they could do better. While in paid employment, they started their own business called Cadran at the beginning of 1998. The ‘better’ was mainly about the quality of service, knowledge sharing and collaboration. Building and sharing knowledge is in Cadran’s DNA. We make sure that we regularly see each other at our monthly Expertise Meetings and quarterly at our Group Meeting, despite all of us spending a lot of time at customers. In addition to knowledge sharing, we love challenging work, presenting a good solution, a successful Go-Live after a project and a satisfied customer.

In constant development

In recent years, Cadran has gradually expanded in terms of employees and customers. We moved from the attic in Bunschoten-Spakenburg to Nijkerk in 1999, then moved into the current building in Hoevelaken in 2009. What started with room to spare has now become a size too small and thus it is time to take new steps. We have expanded our collaboration with Oracle more and more and have been named Business Partner of the Year three times: in 2011, 2013 and 2016.

International collaboration

We also internationally broadened our company by founding Redfaire International, the international partnership with companies like us. Cadran is one of Redfaire International’s three shareholders, and we recently welcomed the ninth partner. With it, we are ensuring global coverage and a strong local service for implementation of and support in JD Edwards, Oracle Cloud and NetSuite. Our motto is “Global reach combined with local expertise”. Redfaire International perfectly aligns with Cadran values; here, we are also making major investments in sharing and building knowledge and in new technology. Our consultants, for example, are undergoing training in Italy and the US.

Strategy

In recent years, the Oracle portfolio has expanded considerably and we have grown along with Oracle and our customers. In addition to JD Edwards, we also offer NetSuite and Oracle Cloud. We see an increasing demand for SaaS, IaaS and PaaS in the market: software, infrastructure and platform as a service respectively. As JD Edwards, Oracle Cloud and NetSuite are open systems, the connection with new technologies is easily made. In the name of ‘digital transformation’, we are seeing various developments in mobile, social, IoT, data science, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality. The systems we work with can easily be linked to those. There are also important Oracle cloud applications that offer added value to our JD Edwards customers, like BI Cloud, Planning & Budgeting Cloud and Master Data Management Cloud. The great thing is that our extensive portfolio offers something for everyone. For customers that prefer the private cloud and on-premise, we offer a complete set of products and services surrounding JD Edwards. Customers that want to go to the public cloud will be pleased with NetSuite or Oracle Cloud. We would be happy to advise you on what software is best for your organisation.

Product development

In collaboration with our Redfaire International partners, we expressly invest in product development, including for example business intelligence (BI).  With the increased amounts of data, we are seeing a larger demand for BI and analytics. We have put together a separate practice for this, with which we can run statistical and forecast analyses based on R-programming. We also developed BI for JD Edwards: a total BI Cloud solution for JD Edwards. Cadran is also further investing in its Commodity Trading and Risk Management module (CTRM) which is fully integrated with JD Edwards and Oracle BI. Our Redfaire International partners in turn have developed solutions for “AP Automation”, Internet of Things solutions and data archiving.

2018

We will continue to help our customers with their growth in the coming years and in order to achieve this, we constantly work on our products and services and worldwide support. To allow Cadran to grow properly, we will need a mix of experience and young fervour, and in the upcoming months we will be recruiting many people that share our values. At Cadran it’s about freedom, fun, building a long-term relationship, knowledge and proactivity. We do not want to become a multinational, but will instead keep our feet on the ground, no-nonsense, and that includes our management team. We may have been around for 20 years, but we still feel young and are full of energy and ambition to work with our customers to grow and develop further. We wish you a very successful 2018, full of growth, both personally and for your organisation!

Happy holidays!

Ed Pieters, Henny Berends and Jan Wester