SAP for the furniture trade

With its two large shopping centers and numerous ranges of furniture, fashion, technology and food, the family-owned company Dodenhof has a wealth of experience in retail.

The furniture trade in particular is also facing major challenges, as the degree of complexity has grown considerably: customers can put together highly individual products, for example by choosing the color and upholstery, right through to furnishing their entire home.

Together with KPS Consulting, a consulting firm for business transformation, Dodenhof has now consolidated its business processes as part of a 24-month project and is the first furniture retailer in Germany to implement SAP Retail on the basis of the KPS best practice model.

The first challenge of the project was to map the complex sales processes in furniture retail live. To this end, the consulting company compared the business processes in accordance with the KPS industry reference model for furniture retail with Dodenhof's requirements from spring 2014 and mapped them in the SAP system using the rapid prototyping process.

"We chose KPS for this project because we are convinced of the speed and reliability of their rapid transformation method and their change management.

In addition, the KPS consultants have the experience and know-how to adapt and implement the standard SAP Retail solution for the furniture retail trade"

says Karsten Kamrath, Managing Director at Dodenhof.

"It was also important to prepare Dodenhof for future challenges and strategies such as omnichannel, cross-selling and mobile commerce"

explains Andreas Iken, Head of IT & Organization at Dodenhof.

The second step was to replace the somewhat outdated IT landscape. The infrastructure, which the company's IT manager himself described as a "burning platform", could no longer be further developed, and errors that could no longer be reproduced were accumulating: even small procedural changes caused high costs and the solutions were too inflexible.

In addition, increasingly necessary upgrades of ERP and POS systems were no longer possible. Right at the start of the second phase, KPS involved key users, i.e. Dodenhof's specialist departments, as process specialists and was thus able to ensure that the new system was adapted precisely to the requirements of the furniture industry and Dodenhof in particular.

Patrick Braun, Partner at KPS, explains:

"This allowed the integration project to be implemented much more quickly."

The go-live took place in three stages: In May 2015, the project team was able to activate the fashion area, followed five months later (October 2015) by the technology area and in November the furniture area was also ready. During the first go-live, the master data for over two million products had to be transferred.

For around four months, the previously three different merchandise management systems have been running on a single platform and the project team is delighted with the result.

"In future, tablets with an interface developed by KPS will be used in sales talks: customers will be able to see their personal sofa or their new wall unit immediately, while the integration with manufacturers and the system runs automatically in the background"

says Andreas Iken, who already has further plans: Dodenhof wants to convert the kitchen area in the next step and rely on SAP Retail here too. This project should also be completed by the end of 2016. KPS is proud to have successfully implemented the first go-live of an SAP solution for the furniture retail sector.