Kurt König Group: Digital transformation of a nine-decade-old retail company

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 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.