Smart Material Technologies, Built Over a Century
Bang & Bonsomer delivers smart material technologies through distribution and production of raw materials and own-brand products, serving a broad range of sectors, including food, construction, paints & coatings, packaging, personal care, cosmetics, water treatment, energy, fire prevention, road maintenance, and more. Established in Finland in 1927 and approaching its centenary, the group took its present shape when Bonsomer, a Finnish limited partnership founded in 1966, merged with Bang in 1993. It generated a turnover of €154 million in 2025 and currently has offices and production sites in nine countries.
Distribution accounts for about two thirds of sales. The rest comes from the group's own products and brands, its solutions and services, and its application laboratories and technical centers, where Bang & Bonsomer works with customers and suppliers to find the right formula for an application. The business is organized into three business groups, under which sixteen business units operates, several of which have production facilities: masterbatches in Sweden, food-industry preparations and industrial adhesives in Denmark, specialized chemicals in Finland, and a factory in Gothenburg that came with the acquisition of B. Engelhardt & Co AB. Running IT across all of it is a team of four, including Group ICT Manager Tero Törnqvist.
Growth Blocked by an Undocumented System
The system underneath that growth was, in Tero Törnqvist's description, really legacy: “nobody knew what that ERP was doing anymore.” The first move into Sweden raised a question it could not answer. “We realized that we can't even go with our current ERP because we don't know how to enable a new currency,” he says. “It was so modified, and there was no record of who was doing what.” Creating a roadmap for the ERP upgrade was his first task after joining the company.
Choosing IFS, Then Choosing the Cloud
The shortlist ran to five candidates, and the criteria were narrow. “Our requirements were that it has to have references from food production or pharma production because we also need batch tracking,” says Tero. “We work with food and dangerous chemicals a lot.” IFS Applications 9 was the choice, and it ran the business well for years.
Years later, a conversation with IFS about support and licensing became a plan to move to IFS Cloud. Two things pushed it along. The platform had run out of road: support for the group's version of IFS Applications 9 had ended, and the Windows and Oracle servers underneath it were aging. Meanwhile, the business kept growing — “during the time we have been an IFS customer, we have made ten acquisitions.” A hosted, managed platform answered both at once, putting the group back on a supported release line and taking server maintenance away from the two people who had been managing it.
An Upgrade Delivered Alongside a Partner
The upgrade ran with Aveso, a Finnish IFS partner, and the planning did something useful before any configuration began: it tested every customization against what IFS Cloud now does as standard. “Part of those customizations are just to make it work like the previous one,” says Tero. “And finally, you learn to use the current one so you realize that you don't need the customizations.”
The technical side took longer than planned, and the team is open about it: database copies, storage sizing, and archived reports all needed working through, and the project was deliberately paused at one point to get the foundations right. The business side was another story. “From the business process point of view, from the business users’ point of view, we didn't have any major issues in this project,” says Tero. “None.”
Bang & Bonsomer went live on IFS Cloud in May 2025.
Standard Configuration Instead of Custom Code
The clearest gain is what the group no longer carries. “We got rid of all twenty modifications,” says Tero — and without them, moving to the next release is a matter of weeks of testing rather than a full upgrade project.
The integration layer moved to Boomi at the same time. “Boomi has been working very well,” says Tero. The team also found a shortcut for building what it needs, in the API Explorer's integration category and in one detail of how IFS Cloud works: “each quick report becomes an API.”
Reliable, Fast, and Easy to Learn
Almost a year in production, Tero is glad the group did the upgrade. “We've been very satisfied with the performance,” he says — better, in fact, than the servers the group used to run itself.
Adoption was smoother than expected. “We trained first the key users and then key users trained the end users,” says Tero, and the old Apps 9 instructions largely still worked, since the functions kept their names and mainly the screens changed. The browser interface was a real adjustment for people with years in Apps 9, but for a company the group merged in Finland it was the opposite: “it was extremely fast for them to learn to use IFS Cloud because they had never used IFS Apps 9.” For a group that keeps acquiring, that matters — and a ClickLearn license bought before the project is now being implemented to make onboarding easier still.
The group also has something it did not have before: someone else accountable for the platform. “We have a very good partner who is helping us,” says Tero.
Ready for the Next Release and the Next Market
The next step is already in motion — the release upgrade from IFS Cloud 23R2 to 25R2, again with Aveso, starting with a database copy from production into the test environment. That cadence is the point of the move: with nothing custom to carry forward and integrations on a modern layer, the group can take releases as they come and keep adding countries and businesses without asking whether the ERP can follow.
