History

COAS was founded February 28, 1987 on the attic of Bas and Evert de Blok. In the early days the company was known as CAS - Computer Aided Services.

We received our first corporate order to create UUR, Unilever Uren Registratie an application for time registration and generation of employee special payments. The system has been in operation for many years till it was replaced by VUUR (short for Replacement Uur) in 2001.

In 1992 we got the order to build a specification system for Unilever to be used within detergents. This system was rolled out to 20 sites within Unilever HPC Europe.

Around 1993 we started with the first oracle client server applications using PowerBuilder as Rapid Application Development tool. In 1995 we switched to Borland Delphi as that was a more stable and mature toolset.

Foundation of COAS Business Systems in 1995 as a spin of of COAS Software Systems. COAS Business Systems serves the local market with office solutions like hardware, standard software, networks and communication solutions.

First web based applications are rolled out in 1998 using Delphi and Java Servlets and Java Server Pages and Oracle.

In october 1998 COAS India was founded in Hyderabad to offshore our projects and use the extended capacity.

"Early 2000 we delivered a clearance system for Foods, Home and Personalcare products. The system is used around the globe and acts as a portal and is able to clear products in different knowledge domains like Toxicology, Microbiology, Ecotoxicology and other areas. The system was in production for more than 10 years before it was upgraded to include a project workflow."

Delivery of global Hold and Release system in 2002. This webbased system manages product hold and releases and runs user defined workflows depending on the reason for the hold.

In 2004 a new office was hired and 200 people can work here. This office is not in use since a few years.

The india offshoring operation is rebranded in 2006 and will focus on offshoring R&D teams for ISVs.

In 2010 we got the order to create a pallet labelling and dispatching system for two factories. We decided to create a generic application and now the system has been rolled out to 25 factories around Europe, Africa and the Middle East. After more than 20 years of doing business with Unilever we got the Unilever Preferred Supplier status.

In 2015 we moved from Stellendam to a modern office in Middelharnis