Case study · Horse transport, Morocco corridor
How do you give a sister company access to your systems without giving it the keys?
Med&Ark Services SARL · SARL · Rabat, Morocco · medark.ma
Med&Ark runs the Morocco to Europe corridor for the Koekkoek network. To do its job it needs live access to horses, stays, orders and health certificates held by its Dutch parent. It must not be able to see anything else, and it must never touch the parent's database or log in as a person.
Parent sync
livesigned · scoped · mirrored
- Access
- Scoped to one slice
- Every request
- Signed three ways
- Data
- Held in the EU
- Languages
- French and English
Before
The easy answers were all wrong.
Give the Moroccan team a login to the Dutch system and you have handed a separate legal entity an account inside your business, with whatever that account can reach. Give them a database connection and it is worse. Copy the data over nightly and they are working from yesterday while a horse moves today.
The requirement was narrow and firm: Med&Ark sees the Morocco-relevant slice of the parent's operation, live, and nothing else. Not by agreement or good behaviour, but because nothing else is reachable.
What was built
Two applications and one carefully drawn seam.
Public site
The corporate site in French and English, choosing language by where the visitor is, with the road corridor, air network, stables and services, and a quote form that feeds the operations app directly.
Operations console
The staff application: horses, stays, orders, health certificates and the Morocco export documents, in French, with role-separated access.
Morocco exports
The one record type Med&Ark owns outright, created and edited on its side and written back to the parent, with print-ready output.
Stable map
The parent's barn layout rendered in Med&Ark's own console, with a box lighting up when a stay it is allowed to see occupies it.
Quote pipeline
Leads captured on the public site, worked through contacted and closed, answered with a branded reply, and pushed up to the parent when the job belongs to the wider network.
Activity feed
A reverse audit showing what the parent's staff did to the records Med&Ark shares, so both offices see the same history.
The hard part
Specify the contract first, then build against it.
The integration was designed before it existed. Med&Ark's client, its mirror tables, its authentication and its screens were built first against an honest empty state, and the API contract was written from the consuming side and handed to the parent as a specification. Mock data was explicitly forbidden, so nothing was ever demonstrated working against something imaginary.
Every request carries three independent proofs: a bearer key, a signature over the method, path, timestamp and body, and a second detached signature made with a private key that never leaves the server. If any signing material is missing the client refuses to send, rather than falling back to something weaker.
Writes are constrained on both sides by an explicit list of fields that may be changed, and edits carry the version they were based on, so two offices touching the same export produce a conflict rather than a silent overwrite.
Keeping the two sides in step without hammering the parent is handled by a checksum. Each resource exposes a hash, and the mirror is only refreshed when the hash stops matching. Nothing is polled for its own sake.
And when the parent is unreachable, the console does not break. It serves the last known state, tells the user plainly that it is degraded and when it last synced, and carries on. In an operation moving live animals, an honest stale answer beats an error page.
Where it stands
A separate company in a different country works inside the exact slice of its parent's operation that its job requires, in real time, without an account, a database connection or a single unnecessary record.
Files never pass through a browser holding a key: passports, stay documents and certificates are proxied through Med&Ark's own backend, so the credential stays on the server.
The public site was built to be found as well as read, with structured data, a full French and English content tree, and a brief written specifically for AI crawlers.
Access is protected the way the data deserves: sessions bound to the device that created them, a stay-signed-in scheme that stores only a hash rather than anything reusable, and a strict content policy that forbids inline scripts outright. The parent's data stays inside the EU throughout.
What a request passes through
Platform & engineering
- Progressive web applications
- PostgreSQL
- Signed machine-to-machine integration
- Cryptographic request signing
- Optimistic concurrency control
- Device-bound sessions
- EU-hosted infrastructure
More work
European road transport, live animals
Koekkoek Int. Horse Transport B.V.
A platform, not an app: the whole company on one set of records.
Intercontinental equine air transport
Horse E.T. B.V.
A platform that understands the horse before the journey is planned.
Shared operations layer
Lorys B.V.
The neutral layer letting a road company and an air company work as one.
Start here
Your operation is different. That is the point.
Every system here was built around how one company actually works. Tell us how yours runs and we will tell you what it would take.