BG-Engineering: seasonal hosting for road slipperiness prevention
Scaling up and down with the seasons
Unlike many applications, BG-Engineering experiences peak traffic during nighttime, early morning, and winter months. It makes sense: their applications help road managers with road slipperiness prevention. TrueFullstaq provides managed hosting and scales the platform up in the fall and back down in the spring.
Road slipperiness prevention in action
BG-Engineering's applications support the Dutch executive agency of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management (Rijkswaterstaat), provinces, and municipalities with effective road slipperiness prevention. Their slipperiness alert system works with road sensors that register slipperiness risk, while their road salting system tracks de-icing vehicles in real-time.
"Our applications send notifications about expected slippery conditions based on data from road sensors," explains Patrick Bachofner, Technical Director and owner of BG-Engineering. "Weather agencies such as KNMI and Infoplaza provide forecasts about condensation, black ice, and snow, which we link to spreading routes. Contractors see the expected driving time, clients monitor where de-icing has occurred, and this data is automatically processed into invoices. The financial processing of spreading actions has been shortened from 4 to 8 weeks to just 2 weeks."
Flexible scaling with the seasons
"For BG-Engineering, it's important that we're ready to scale up in the fall," explains Jeffrey van Excel, Windows Engineer at TrueFullstaq. "We deploy two additional servers with extra monitoring; if needed, more resources are immediately available. In the spring, we scale back down to prevent overloaded servers in winter and to limit costs and energy use in summer."
Patrick confirms this: "Servers are great, but they don't need to be running in summer. This form of managed hosting strengthens our responsiveness. Slippery conditions can't be planned like seasonal sales or Black Friday - it's an entire season that can go any direction. When it snows, we immediately switch to maximum capacity. With over 900 spreaders online, we process terabytes of data per second. TrueFullstaq keeps this under control."
Customized service levels
The platform's busy periods are concentrated at night and early morning. "That's why we prefer to do updates during the day, at a time we determine together," says Jeffrey. "We've automated a lot for nighttime operations. In winter, we offer a customized Service Level Agreement, giving tickets higher priority."
Development during the quiet period
The winter period is high season for BG-Engineering. In summer, the software is further developed and improved. "For example, we've added functionality to generate live spreading routes," Patrick explains. "In winter, you want to leave the software alone. Depending on the type of winter, we have 5 to 7 summer months for new features and maintenance of spreaders, sensors, and weather stations." TrueFullstaq's engineers are also available in the summer for larger system upgrades.
Future ambitions
"Although we differ in size from clients such as Rijkswaterstaat, we've proven ourselves as a 'small' Rotterdam company to be a full-fledged partner," says Patrick. "We serve road managers in both the Netherlands and Belgium. Our ambition is to strengthen that position between clients and contractors, grow toward a fully cloud-based solution, and participate in European tenders."
