Problem – Business need
Decathlon Schwetzingen is Germany’s central and largest warehouse. At this location there is a small shop, which is not big enough to display all the products, which kept Decathlon from maximizing the value of its assets at this location.
Decathlon wanted to unleash the potential of its central warehouse in Germany without investing in establishing a correspondingly big shop. They needed a solution that covered all working hours, had consistent tech support and enabled employees to order products directly from the warehouse, that is next to the store.
Solution
DACH Bridge’s proposition was to create a mobile app for the store employees and the employees in the warehouse, to enable communication and order creation and processing. We also developed a web page so customers could track the process of their orders, thus enabling communication and interaction between them, shop assistants and warehouse employees, eventually creating a new kind of shopping experience.
To further guarantee the performance of the app we offered tech support to Decathlon, matching their work hours from Monday to Saturday.
The solution design was proposed by DACH Bridge and the project was based on Amazon Web Services, .NET WebAPI, MySQL and Android firmware. The implementation required one way communication with several Decathlon systems.
Approach – Implementation approach
The solution consisted of three main modules.
Seller module – for checking products, creating and tracking orders.
Warehouse module – processing orders and managing workload among employees.
Customer module – real time order tracking.
An especially important element of the whole process was the alignment of the development process to the daily business at the warehouse. DACH Bridge handled this knowledge and skills transfer without any interference in the client’s business.
Result – Benefits
By introducing the application, Decathlon was able to achieve major business benefits within a very short time. One of the major achievements was the significant increase of sales/purchases without an increase in costs.
The end result was a small branch of 800 sq. m with a big logistics center of 30.000 sq. m. All Decathlon products were available to their clients within 30 minutes.
