From seven hours of computing
to five minutes:
this is how we build it.
A conversation with Peter Vermunt, Managing Director of New Motion in Middelburg, about the years New Motion spent waiting for a new integration, exports that had to run overnight and still were not finished by morning, and the integration that now turns all of that into a single file.
New Motion: one market,
and very good at it.
New Motion builds conveyor belts and handling systems for the food industry. Think biscuits, chocolates, speculaas and pepernoten. As Peter Vermunt himself sums it up: all tasty and, above all, sweet things.
The systems go directly to manufacturers of biscuits and confectionery, and to machine builders who integrate them into their own solutions. Everything the company makes is stainless steel and designed specifically for the environment it will operate in. Design and manufacturing both happen in-house. Around ten engineers work on the projects, roughly half of them employed and half joining as freelancers.
That focus on a single market is a deliberate choice, and according to Peter that is exactly where the strength lies. Not for nothing is the company’s motto: always in motion.
- 01Conveyor belts and handling systems. For the food industry, supplied to manufacturers of biscuits and confectionery and to machine builders.
- 02Everything in stainless steel. Designed to meet the demands of a food factory.
- 03Design and manufacturing in-house. The purchased parts are built up into complete systems here.
- 04Beyond the standard range too. With in-house designs such as the Pull Nose Conveyor and a UV-C disinfection tunnel.
Because we do nothing but conveyor systems for the food industry, we are simply very good at it.
Who is Peter Vermunt?
Peter Vermunt is New Motion’s director and majority shareholder, or in his own words: the DGA, as that is known in the Netherlands. He took over the company through a management buy-in on 1 January 2017, which will make it ten years in early 2027.
Before that he held various management positions in logistics, production and IT, but he had always wanted a company of his own. Hence the move.
His day-to-day work revolves around organising and optimising processes. Not around a single machine, but around the way the whole company works.
In recent years we have refined and optimised the process to the point where, with roughly the same number of people, we generate almost twice the revenue.
It was precisely that optimisation drive that brought the design work and the ERP system into focus. New Motion was losing a great deal of time linking and exporting bills of materials. That is where the story of this integration begins.
What he is proudest of is not a single project but the way of working: efficient collaboration, specialised and fully focused on the food industry.
What I am most proud of is that we do this together and have built a highly streamlined process.
Almost everything they design, they have to purchase.
The process starts in Autodesk Inventor. First a rough 3D concept that is checked with the customer: does the system fit in the factory, and within the available layout? The design is then fully detailed in 3D, and the individual parts are also drawn in 2D.
And then comes the point where things go wrong. New Motion designs the systems itself and builds them in-house; for its parts supply, the company works with partners. Every individual item in that design therefore has to end up in the ERP system, because that is where it is ordered. A system consists of a great many parts. Copying them over by hand is not an option: it is laborious and error-prone.
Inventor already counts how many units of each item are needed. If that information flows one-to-one into Ridder iQ, New Motion can move straight on to ordering. That is exactly what an integration is for.
The integration essentially automates our ordering process.
An export that had to run overnight,
and still was not finished by morning.
There was already an integration, supplied by a large reseller. But in Peter Vermunt’s experience, it made the work heavier rather than lighter, and it was not always reliable either.
It started during the design work itself. Through an add-in with a button for Ridder iQ, you had to specify for each part what kind of item it was: miscellaneous, metal, plastic, sheet material or tube. Or you had to link it to another item. With so many parts per system, that added up. And if there was a single linking error anywhere, the entire export ground to a halt.
Then came the exporting itself. Because all sorts of logic sat inside the interface, it consumed an enormous amount of processing time. A complete assembly often ran for six to seven hours. Sometimes the assembly even had to be cut into smaller blocks to get it to work at all.
And there was a second brake on the process. The integration did not support Autodesk Inventor 2025. For as long as New Motion depended on it, the company could not move to the latest version either and stayed on Inventor 2024.
- 01Manual linking during design work. Assigning an item type again for every single part in the system.
- 02Six to seven hours per export. So long that the computer was switched on in the evening just for that.
- 03One linking error brought everything to a standstill. The export stalled and you started again.
- 04Resubmitting failed exports again and again. If the export went wrong, it took a lot of time to rerun it until it went through.
- 05Stuck on Inventor 2024. The integration did not support Inventor 2025, so New Motion could not move to the latest version.
- 06Fragmented knowledge. The logic was hidden inside the interface, nobody had full sight of it any more, and the tool kept growing older.
“A new version is coming.”
Peter Vermunt: the supplier of the old integration had been promising a new version for years, but it never materialised. Meanwhile, New Motion remained stuck with software that only grew older.
We tried all sorts of things, but it is simply an outdated solution.
Starting the export in the evening and
just hoping, next morning, that it worked.
We used to start the export in the evening. Only the next morning would we find out whether everything had gone well or the export had stalled because some files were not processed.
After that, we lost a lot of time rerunning the export again and again until it went through.
After years of promises: a partner that actually delivers.
The contact with Cadkunde came about through word of mouth. One of the freelance engineers at New Motion already knew Cadkunde, and shortly afterwards a customer of New Motion turned out to be in touch with them as well. Little by little, that led to an introduction. It clicked, and the two parties moved forward together.
After that experience, trust was not a given. For Peter Vermunt it came down to three factors. The people at Cadkunde came across as professional and experienced. The integration proved flexible enough to adjust whenever something did not work properly. And New Motion was one of the first customers for this specific solution, which meant there would be real attention.
We knew we would get the attention we needed. And in practice, that is exactly what happened. For me, those were important factors in thinking: this is a partner we can build on.
For Peter, getting in early is not a risk but an advantage. Those who join early can still help shape what the solution will look like.
I sometimes even like being the try-out, the “guinea pig”. That is precisely when you can shape the solution together with the developers into exactly what you want it to be.
A bag every 0.38 seconds. The machine behind it starts as a bill of materials.
Ask what New Motion is known for and you end up at systems where speed and precision meet. A High Speed Merge that turns, flips and merges bags into one continuous flow. A 35-metre conveyor belt with some 110 metres of belt run. Complete lines in stainless steel, built for the conditions of a food factory.
That is also exactly why the bill of materials carries so much weight at New Motion. In Inventor, such a line is one assembly, built up from a great many purchased items, and not a single item can be ordered until it is in Ridder iQ. The more impressive the system, the longer the list. And the longer the old export used to take.
One file, one direction. It does not have to be more than that.
The first meeting took place at the end of 2025. Jaap Flonk of Cadkunde came to give a demonstration of CAD2ERP, the universal ERP integration Cadkunde launched in 2025. New Motion said: go ahead. A waiting list then formed, because more companies had become interested in this integration in the meantime. In March 2026 the set-up at New Motion began. Four months later the integration was in place. With the previous supplier, the wait for a new version had by then already lasted years, without one ever arriving.
Where the old integration tried to place all sorts of logic between the two systems, CAD2ERP does exactly one thing. It converts the bill of materials from Inventor into a single flat file, without translation and without rules hidden away inside an interface. If there is an error in the data, an error log reports exactly which information is wrong, instead of the whole export collapsing halfway through.
One file between two systems. Inventor writes the bill of materials out as an XML file, Ridder iQ imports it, and nothing is translated or recalculated along the way.
The choice New Motion reversed
In the beginning, New Motion still had data pulled back from Ridder iQ into Inventor. That was deliberately undone later on. Peter Vermunt does not believe the integration should be two-way: it has to be clear which system is leading, and for New Motion that is the system the product lives in.
Inventor has to be leading. That is where the product lives and where the drawings are. Ridder iQ follows.
The fact that a working piece of custom work was taken back out says something about the way this project ran. Not everything that is possible is also necessary. As a result the integration has stayed smaller than it could have been, and that is precisely what keeps it manageable.
That is what is so pleasant about Cadkunde’s CAD2ERP integration. It is very direct. You generate an XML file, you import it into Ridder iQ and then it is done.
The integration was built to measure by Jaap.
Jaap Flonk, CTO of Cadkunde, built the integration between Inventor and Ridder iQ for New Motion. What stands out for Peter Vermunt above all is how short the lines are. Jaap is easy to reach, acts quickly and almost always finds a moment to take a look, evenings and weekends included.
New Motion noticed that most of all on its own side of the line. To get the integration live, the company assigned one employee internally. That person kept asking questions, and Jaap kept answering them. Not an explanation that stops after one go, but someone who stays available for as long as the questions keep coming.
Built the CAD2ERP integration for New Motion.
They are pleasant people who think logically and act quickly. They have both feet on the ground and no pretensions.
Alongside that accessibility, Peter immediately adds an honest note: he hopes Jaap can keep up that way of working for all his customers, because as Cadkunde grows, that will naturally become harder. As far as he is concerned, what sets them apart from other IT suppliers is not only accessibility, but above all who stays at the table. At many IT companies, he says, you start out with the heavyweights and the project is then taken over by people who understand far less of the substance.
The advantage of Cadkunde is that there are really only heavyweights there. The people who lead the project understand for themselves how the technology and the processes fit together.
The heaviest part of the old process disappears.
A complete assembly that used to run for six to seven hours is finished in about five minutes with the new integration. The XML file is then in Ridder iQ within seconds. No more computer switched on in the evening to spend all night on it, and no morning that starts with the question of whether the export succeeded.
At least as important is what the integration adds to the process itself: a clear end point. Once the XML file has been generated, engineering is finished and work preparation can take over. That boundary used to be far less sharp.
On top of that, the brake on the CAD environment is off. Where the old integration did not support Inventor 2025, New Motion now simply works in the latest version of Inventor. And the integration itself runs smoothly and reliably.
With this integration I do expect a big time saving and above all less irritation.
Per complete assembly. It used to take six to seven hours.
The XML file is imported within seconds; ordering can start straight after.
No more exports that have to be resubmitted again and again.
The old integration did not support Inventor 2025; New Motion was stuck on 2024.
The generated XML closes off engineering; work preparation takes it from there.
A flat XML file without complicated logic; the error log reports what is wrong.
On clarity, simplicity and speed, this is a leap forward.
As far as I am concerned, the process time required is reduced to a genuine minimum.
Building an integration is one thing.
Making it land is another.
Peter Vermunt names the pitfall that comes with this himself. A technical improvement does not automatically lead to fewer hours. He has seen that before with major improvements in Inventor, which you would expect to save a lot of time, while people still kept spending time on them.
He is honest about the project itself as well. In hindsight, New Motion or Jaap might have put certain things on the table sooner, and along the way things were adjusted or built that turned out not to be needed. That comes with being one of the first customers of a solution that is still very much under development.
That last point is not an objection for him, but a reason to continue. Where the old integration only grew older, this one is actively being developed. CAD2ERP is not standing still, and what New Motion runs into in practice helps determine where the integration grows next.
I would certainly recommend Cadkunde for the fine solution, for their pragmatic approach and because they actively think along about the further development of their solution.
Then we can start a conversation.
Cadkunde helps manufacturing companies standardise and automate their CAD environment and connect it to ERP. Including when that means the standard route is not the right route.