Company overview

Kurt König Group is a German family business operating in the construction industry since 1932. In addition to Germany, the company has branches in Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Backed by nearly 100-year-old experience, the company’s sights are firmly set on the future as they are constantly looking for ways to reinvent the tool industry. This ethos is well-exemplified in how the company describes itself: a family business and start-up in one. 

The collaboration between Kurt König Group and TeleSoftas started in 2017 when the group’s daughter company Kurts Toolbox hired us to build a B2C tool-sharing platform for private customers. The successful collaboration led us to become a technical partner for the entire group in their digital transformation process.

The case

The goal of the still ongoing project is the digitalization of business processes inside the Kurt König Group. Our central task is to build custom software that connects all technical systems used by the group into one infrastructure and allows employees and customers to seamlessly perform their daily operations.

With the project, the company sought to solve several key challenges:

– Unlocking digital sales channels. Until recently, all sales orders and customer interactions had been phone-based, which blocked the company’s long-term business growth. The client wanted to harness digitalization to be able to scale operations more sustainably.

– Centralizing business processes. While operating in four countries, the group’s business processes were not centralized. Each branch used different processes and tools, making it difficult to obtain and compare operational data (such as turnover, revenue and costs).

– Increasing operational efficiency. Prior to the digital redesign of processes, daily operations were inefficient and consumed a considerable amount of time, leading to multiple roles overlapping. Following the thorough review and subsequent redesign of the processes, a remarkable transformation has taken place.

The challenge

In the first fixed scope project phase, our goal was to digitize the company’s sales processes by building the first version of Kurt König’s online store. After that, our team organically shifted to the step-by-step transformation of other business processes (e.g., registering new customers, managing customer accounts, and inviting existing customers to become users of the online store).

We then continued with helping to integrate the enterprise resource planning system into the group’s infrastructure, integrating the ERP with the new online store, and planning and developing a custom-built employee portal system. 

Throughout the digital transformation process, we have been closely collaborating with Kurt König Group’s design and brand innovation unit.

INTEGRATIONS

SAP ByD
Product Management System
Azure Active Directory
Payment gateways

SERVICES

Dedicated Development Team
UX/ UI Design
Web App development
Back-end development
Front-end development
DevOpsProject Management

TECH

AWS
Symfony
API platform
Terraform
Docker
ElasticSearch
Cypress
React
Firebase

LANGUAGES

PHP
JavaScript

The solution

Customer Portal

Customer Portal combines the functionalities of an online store, customer data management and customer interaction. Launched in 2021, the backbone of the customer portal is a custom-developed online store with all standard online shop functionalities: product search and comparison, making sales orders, registering a customer account that allows companies to make purchases on credit and save details for easy checkout, etc. Additionally, the staff can invite existing customers to use the online store.

 

Employee Portal

Employee Portal simplifies the daily workflow of the group’s staff. It shares data and information with the customer portal while offering access to additional functionalities and data. The portal allows the team to capture sales orders on behalf of customers who call the sales representatives or visit physical stores, manage customer data of the group’s more than 12,000 active customers and analyze operational data.

 

Integrations

The online store is directly connected to the enterprise resource planning system (SAP Business ByDesign), allowing seamless data synchronization between the two systems. The integration guarantees that all product and price data is up-to-date, gives the logistics department access to accurate customer details, provides the sales team with access to customer order history and ensures that the entire staff has the latest data at their fingertips.

Management system, payment gateways and internal systems

In addition to ERP, the system is integrated with a product information management system, payment gateways and internal systems such as Azure Active Directory for employee identification.

Dedicated project team

Currently, four SCRUM teams are working for the client, inside Telesoftas, covering all necessary roles: from front-end and back-end engineers, quality assurance specialists, a SCRUM master, a product owner and additional experts, such as SAP engineers and technical consultants. Most recently, a dedicated data science team joined projects, which purpose is to gather data from all the systems and make it easily accessible to staff via an intuitive dashboard. They do this through Data Lakehouse architecture, which enables clients to use Business intelligence (BI) and machine learning (ML) for making data-driven decisions and predictions.

 

While most of our collaboration takes place online, we also hold regular onsite meetings in both Lithuania and Germany, which we occasionally combine with visits to the group’s physical stores to observe the company’s processes first-hand.

Currently, four SCRUM teams are working for the client, inside Telesoftas, covering all necessary roles: from front-end and back-end engineers, quality assurance specialists, a SCRUM master, a product owner and additional experts, such as SAP engineers and technical consultants. Most recently, a dedicated data science team joined projects, which purpose is to gather data from all the systems and make it easily accessible to staff via an intuitive dashboard. They do this through Data Lakehouse architecture, which enables clients to use Business intelligence (BI) and machine learning (ML) for making data-driven decisions and predictions.

Simpler workflow for employees

The employee portal functions as a direct extension of the ERP system but allows the staff to perform operations faster and with considerably less complexity.

Streamlined business processes

As the solution is used throughout the organization and integrated with other systems, processes across the group are more harmonized and streamlined.

Improved business analytics

Thanks to aggregating and giving easy access to customer data, employees can make data-driven decisions in ways that were previously not possible

Up-to-date customer and product data

The ERP integration allows data to be seamlessly synchronized between the systems, always ensuring up-to-date product and customer data.

The outcome

The custom-built portals stand out for their simplicity and user-friendly design, ramping up the user experience for both customers and employees.


The company introduced a new online sales channel, allowing customers to make purchases conveniently without contacting the store or visiting physical locations. This digital platform supports business scalability without the need for new locations or additional personnel. Simultaneously, the employee portal, an extension of the ERP system, streamlines workflows for faster and less complex operations. The organization’s integrated solution harmonizes and streamlines business processes, ensuring up-to-date customer and product data through seamless ERP synchronization. This accessibility empowers employees for informed, data-driven decisions.

Future plans include implementing AI for pricing, developing an algorithm considering factors like competitor pricing, market conditions, and available stock.

”We are extremely satisfied with TeleSoftas performance and very happy about the result. TeleSoftas has been an essential part of creating an outstanding start for the kurts© product.”

Fabian Schuster
Head of Corporate Development, Kurt König

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