Co-operation where it matters the most. Our Apex expert has been working as an external employee at a major Finnish e-commerce operation building new business processes.

Evaluation and design of future business needs strong understanding of retail processes from supplier collaboration to pricing strategies, capabilities needed to make those processes reality and the system landscape responsible of offering the needed features.

Situation and goals

Retail organizations always have their first priority in running the daily business but at the same time looking forward in the strategic period to develop towards the set goals. In the midst of preparing for campaigns, seasonal assortments and sales peak periods, and putting out the occasional fires in the existing systems, it is demanding and time consuming to switch the context to development.

In this situation our customer turned to us, requesting help in studying, verifying and re-modeling their drop ship vendor business model. The goal was to streamline the business model to work on top of new systems with less integration work, a hassle free onboarding process and lighter weight financial flow thus improving the important business KPIs like time-to-market from first contact to first products sold.

Instantly productive

We sent our best Business Architect to a Bear Grylls -like… well no, not in this case anyway. Apex already knew the customer and had common history. We agreed that the best way to implement the work is as an external employee, a part of the customer organization. This time it was a given to fulfill one of our most important brand promises: “instantly productive”. We were able to outline the assignment, correct key stakeholders and the needed outcomes on the first day.

Our expert lead the work, arranged the needed meetings, workshops and gathered the information to one, coherent documentation. Stakeholder collaboration had an important role as the business model cuts through systems and processes all the way from supplier and product information through sales, returns and refunds to finance and reporting. Every aspect needed to be clarified and designed against the assumed frame of the new model.

The results

Apex value comes from the possibility to challenge, participate and steer, not only listen and document. We were able to bring in a professional with opinions and solutions that helped the customer form this new business model. The end result, in addition to the process descriptions, architecture diagrams and data flows was that, yes, it is possible to implement this change. Some minor capabilities were missing but could be developed to make this model reality. There is an investment to make in the re-model but it will carry this business model to an even higher importance and of course profit.

After the work done in this process the assignment of our Business Architect expanded to help pushing forward another business model under development. At Apex each day we redeem our place at our customers. It has been great noticing we still work together.