Komplett gears up for the future with real-time data and innovation

With today's rapid technological development and changing market needs, it is common for businesses to modernize and improve their systems. Replacing the entire technological platform requires a lot of effort. Komplett worked in outdated systems and saw it as necessary to make significant changes to meet market needs and get rid of technical debt. Komplett achieved lower downtime, higher security, live data reporting and more sustainable growth through a collaboration with Evidi and Pearl. The project also enhanced Komplett's business model by fostering efficiency and innovation through close cooperation.

Komplett recognized that their services needed more development as the online market and technical debt expanded quickly. They used outdated, complex solutions and had to scale up. The large amount of technical debt made it hard to adapt fast enough to keep up with the changing market demands.

Olav Bø Hernes, Chief Architect at Komplett, says that the systems Komplett used had messy integrations that they could not fully control. The data was in different places, so it was hard to add new solutions and involved too many resources. This slowed down their development and innovation for their customers, which was not a good way of working. 

They wanted a long-term partner they could work well with. Evidi and Pearl decided to partner up and offer a solution that suited Komplett. Many other strong market players also offered solutions, but Komplett chose Evidi's solutions and Pearl's SAP service team. Both Pearl and Evidi worked closely with Komplett's internal development teams, and Komplett also built much of the service platform itself.

Replacing the entire technological platform and ERP system is a time-consuming and expensive process. However, in order to get rid of technical debt and maintain operational efficiency, Komplett considered it a necessary move. A completely new SAP solution was built based on S/4 HANA, and a digital service platform, DSP (Digital Service Platform). DSP can be explained as a layer that sits on top of the SAP platform. This is tightly integrated, but at the same time independent of SAP (ERP system).

We have collaborated with Evidi on many diverse services. Instead of having integrations directly into and out of the ERP system, we have now created the integrations as separate services in another layer, called DSP, which is outside the ERP layer, says Olav Bø Hernes, Chief Architect, Komplett.

The project had enough time for strategic advice, and for designing and building different services. It also had clear architecture guidelines, which were sharper than before. Komplett uses a three-layer separation, based on Gartners Pace Layered Architecture, with core systems (including SAP) at the bottom, a service layer in the middle (to access master data), and an innovation layer at the top. This enables consistent master data creation and constant innovation for the customer market.

Martin Witsø Løkkeberg, which is a developer at Evidi, has worked closely with Komplett since they became customers. He says that the project was similar to a total transformation. Olav Bø Hernes from Komplett concurs with the analogy. Olav says that it was a "massive change", with many services being replaced at once. He stresses that it is not just an upgrade, but a transition from the old to the new SAP solution.

We got rid of the old one completely. We built a new one from scratch in a year, Olav says.

Working with Evidi has brought many benefits for Komplett. Olav Bø Hernes points out one of the perks, which is the live updates into the data warehouse. He says that they stream data through an event hub, to Databricks, which then shows up inside the data warehouse.

Olav emphasizes that live updates on sales every minute are a key advantage during Blackweek and other big sales events. He says that an important outcome is the decrease in the downtime that the customer experiences. Before, the whole website would go down when there were updates. Now, when new systems are updated and some parts of the system are offline, the customer's order (and other changes) will be put on hold in the service team and completed when the update is done. Other improvements that Komplett sees after the upgrade are better security and more frequent updates of the ERP system.

Olav is very pleased with the way they have cooperated. He says that they have a powerful internal development environment at Komplett, and that the internal team has engaged closely with the team from Evidi. Komplett and Evidi work together on a daily basis, and instead of Evidi creating all the services for Komplett, Komplett itself has contributed to the development. The conversations with Evidi began strategically, but became more technical as the solutions were put into practice. The collaboration has not followed the usual typical customer-supplier relationship, but has rather been marked by professional cooperation.

Martin from Evidi has joined the platform team at Komplett, which is responsible for, among other things, developing the technical platform for Komplett. He says that the way of working together has led to many valuable professional conversations. This has allowed Evidi to participate in strategic discussions that go beyond the service layer, such as web enhancements and technology decisions.

Komplett has a promising future, where they will keep improving their services. Olav from Komplett says that they have switched from project to product development. The design, architecture and strategy that they established with close cooperation in the project will continue in further development. The service team was built for the whole group, even though Komplett mainly uses it now. They plan to use the service layer as a way to integrate dataflows across the Komplett Group.

By upgrading to the new ERP system and architecture, Komplett can offer more reliable solutions and boost sales efficiency. They also have improved insight and analysis, and stronger security. With the new service layer, Komplett will keep building new services for the market together with Evidi.

The new service layer at Komplett now has more than 28 different services and six Connxio integrations, split into seven distinct domains. These are some of the services that were launched in October 2023:

• Customer service: Manages the master data for customer data, oversees the creation and modification of customer data, and makes sure that related services are updated when customer data changes (incl. SAP).
  
  
• Credit service: Check external credit services for new B2B customers who apply for credit. Send the customer's credit to SAP, which uses it to decide which orders to accept. The service also shares this data with the web services.
  
  
• Order service: Manages all steps in the order process, including alignment with SAP's order processes. Broadcasts order updates to a dozen other services that subscribe to order events.
  
  
• Returns service: Manages all activities related to returns, including coordination between SAP and Web, and sending notifications to customers when they need to know the progress of returns.
  
  
• Price, inventory, and catalog integrations: Keeps web data current with source systems for price, inventory, and catalog information.
  
  
• Shipping service: Manages interaction with different delivery systems (Budbee, Porterbuddy, etc.). The service also talks to Komplett's autostore.
  
  
• Insurance service: Creates insurance from new orders against Trygg.
  
  
• Communication service: Sends all transactional messages to customers through external CRM systems, like order confirmation and pick-up alert of packages.