Project Description

Following the dissolution of the Jelmoli Group, the entire IT environment was not designed as a medium-sized retail company. On the one hand there was a highly complex IT landscape, on the other hand it was not aligned to the retail business. In short, the operation and support of the systems proved difficult. In addition, the IT environment was outdated. The result was high costs for an environment that did not meet the requirements.

In the long run, such a discrepancy between requirements – reality – costs is not acceptable for a company. Simply since inherent risks exist, especially for long-term success.

Quick facts

industry: retail trade
employees: ~ 1.000
solution: xingate, process automation
title: IT-consolidation

benefits: agile collaboration, stock management, reorders management, document management, contract management, account payable, real-time-reporting

About Jelmoli

Founded over 184 years ago, Jelmoli has become Zurich‘s no. 1 premium department store. Situated on the famous Bahnhofstrasse, the shopping complex encompasses 33,000 square meters spread over six floors and features 1,000 premium brands from all over the world.

www.jelmoli.ch

jelmoli

Situation

Right from the start, most of the processes and procedures were different from those in the Jelmoli Group: manual and cumbersome. Each week over 2,000 Excel pages were printed out, updating and adjusting the previous week‘s purchasing quantity to determine the current week‘s purchasing. Results were then manually entered into the systems again.

Fixed structures such as seasonal articles, sales targets, sales commissions, warehousing and much more did not exist. Instead, everything was at the discretion of the respective manager. Taken together, all these manual processes were also personnel-intensive. The entire organization was thus cost-intensive, error-prone and losses were incurred due to insufficient data or simply bad decisions. There was virtually no process automation. In short, Jelmoli had to bear all the burdens that had brought down the Jelmoli Group.

The idea

For all problems, such a situation also offers an opportunity: to set everything up anew and do it right in a highly modern way. So:

  • Rectification of the IT environment
  • Creation of modern and efficient support environments
  • Infrastructure renewal and migration to the private cloud
  • Redefinition of business processes with the goal of company-wide cost reduction
  • Establishment of a cross-departmental collaboration environment
  • An enterprise cockpit with all KPI‘s available at any time and on all devices
  • Consolidation of the software landscape

Solution

It turned out that SAP was not suitable for Jelmoli‘s special requirements. The development effort based on SAP was out of proportion to the continued use of the existing ERP solution with its own extensions.

As a result, it became obvious that it makes more sense to create an entire corporate platform that integrates all systems and optimizes the collaboration between users and employees. The result is an enterprise platform based on xingate from xspera, which then enables cross-departmental and cross-system process automation: seamless and completely transparent.

In production

Jelmoli xingate

With the deployment of xingate and the entire process automation, a new era began for Jelmoli. The foundation for Jelmoli‘s success today:

  • Automated ordering processes that automatically differentiate between inventory and seasonal items
  • Automated delivery management
  • Automated invoicing
  • Automated warehouse logistics for today‘s 1 million articles with real-time inventory monitoring
  • Automated calculation and predictive analysis of current order quantities and comparison with minimum order effort document management
  • Automated contract management
  • And much more

In short, all areas could be highly automated and integrated.

„Overall the process automation based on xspera‘s know how was a business enabler for today‘s Jelmoli success.“

Jelmoli

Benefits

As a result, not only were the expected results achieved, but at some points the expectations were even exceeded:

  • 20% less personnel after elimination of manual activities
  • All processes were massively accelerated from sometimes days to minutes or even real time.
  • Where originally incorrect orders or incorrect article or order allocations were the rule, today there is exact, precise evaluation and demand-oriented article management
  • The entire IT is designed to be simple and transparent
  • The entire solution is future-proof
  • The xingate platform supports the introduction of agile methods, enabling Jelmoli to react even more flexibly and dynamically and to respond to customer requirements.

This project was a major stepstone for Jelmoli and enabled the success story that distinguishes Jelmoli today.