BoConcept streamlines data management across 2M+ product variations and 300+ franchises with Celigo’s iPaaS

About

BoConcept is a globally-recognised furniture manufacturer and retailer, with 340 stores across 67 countries. As Denmark’s largest and most globally recognised furniture brand, it has 400 employees at its headquarters and over 2,000 franchises worldwide. The company’s foundation rests on the quintessential principles that define Danish design’s global appeal: simplicity, craftsmanship, elegant functionality, and quality materials.

For four consecutive years, BoConcept has secured the coveted title of the World’s Best Luxury Furniture and Homeware Company.

The challenge

BoConcept’s business strategy relies on distributing through a global network of over 300 franchisees, spanning retail shops and online channels. While BoConcept manufactures and designs its products in Denmark, its franchises serve as showrooms and local distributors of its furniture.

As the company looked to onboard larger, more established franchisees in various markets, the demands on data availability and reliability became more complex. Additionally, with over 2 million product variations due to endless custom furniture configurations with unique specifications, compatible parts, cross-selling, and bundling opportunities, managing data efficiently became increasingly critical for BoConcept to support its franchise network effectively.

“We are working with some larger franchisees looking to operate multiple stores with a robust organisational setup. This requires providing comprehensive services and integrating directly with their existing systems, such as warehouse management,” said Kasper Guldbrand, Head of IT Portfolio Management at BoConcept.

With this strategic focus, the company embarked on a journey to completely overhaul its product data management, IT architecture, and integration strategy.

BoConcept decided to adopt a composable architecture to ensure flexibility in their operations, and to implement best-of-breed, built-for-purpose services and applications rather than adopt and customise monolith systems or try to develop bespoke applications in-house. “We wanted to focus on designing furniture, not IT,” said Guldbrand.

To achieve its transformation, BoConcept needed a platform that would serve as its central hub for integrations and data transfer, acting as the glue between the 200+ applications it uses, its new master data management platform, and its wide network of franchisees. Essential features the team was looking for included:

• Low-code management tools to facilitate day-to-day platform management without requiring specialised expertise.
• Robust EDI and B2B capabilities.
• Excellent performance tracking and error management.
• A transparent pricing model that incentivises usage and doesn’t penalise organisational growth.

BoConcept launched a rigorous evaluation process, looking for a platform that would be robust yet flexible and intuitive enough to meet its needs.

The solution

BoConcept evaluated market-leading iPaaS platforms like Celigo and niche players in the integration space. They assessed each platform using a comprehensive set of parameters and a proof-of-concept that covered aspects such as ease of use, performance, monitoring, error handling, B2B and connector library, API management, and data transformation capabilities.

During the evaluation process, the BoConcept team found that many of the other platforms lacked the necessary features or fell short in terms of usability. Some solutions had limited EDI support, while others struggled with handling large data volumes or lacked proactive error-handling mechanisms. Most systems were also primarily geared towards experienced developers and would require specialist IT support to maintain. In contrast, according to Guldbrand, Celigo consistently demonstrated superior capabilities across all the evaluated criteria.

Celigo’s extensive library of pre-built connectors and EDI standards made it easy for BoConcept to connect and share data from its vast ecosystem of applications with its franchisees and business partners.

The platform’s powerful data transformation and mapping tools allowed BoConcept to manage and transfer large volumes of complex product data efficiently, ensuring consistency and accuracy across all touchpoints.

Additionally, the flexibility of Celigo’s architecture, with support for multiple environments and connectivity across numerous SaaS as well as on-premise systems, aligned perfectly with BoConcept’s composable IT strategy. The platform’s event-based integration capabilities and application-to-application (A2A) automation features further streamlined BoConcept’s processes, enabling real-time data synchronisation and reducing manual efforts.

“Our strategy focuses on SaaS solutions due to limited in-house development resources, so integrations are crucial for us as we seek best-of-breed tools to support business processes. Celigo is a very important cornerstone that binds together all of our SaaS platforms into one cohesive landscape,” said Gulbrand.

With an integration solution in place, BoConcept began the first phase of an extensive replatforming and transformation project across its ecommerce, ERP, marketing, data warehouse, and other technologies. This includes bringing key applications such as CommerceTools for headless ecommerce, Amplience for headless CMS, Aprimo, Stibo Systems for master data management, and replacing its customized Microsoft AX.3 with a collection of best-of-breed tools such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance.

This solution enabled BoConcept to proactively detect and address integration failures, minimising the impact on their customers and operations. With Celigo, BoConcept can seamlessly integrate its new data system, which serves as a single source of truth for all product-related information, ensuring consistency and accuracy in pricing, measurements, and other variants.

The bottom line

The strategic overhaul facilitated a transition to a new master data management system and comprehensive integrations, positioning BoConcept for remarkable efficiency gains across the board. Notably, this initiative is on track to eliminate the creation of unnecessary product variants, significantly streamline pricing processes, and vastly enhance data availability across systems for improved business decision-making and an enhanced customer experience. With Celigo’s support, BoConcept can consolidate data onto a single platform, laying the groundwork for deploying advanced analytics and AI applications, and setting a new standard in the furniture retail industry.

BoConcept continues to build every integration use case with Celigo, focusing next on the master data management project integrating Stibo with 10+ other applications, replacing BizTalk with Celigo’s EDI solution, adding a shared-basket system for omnichannel order management, integrating Dynamics 365 across the board, and leveraging Celigo’s API Manager to expose certain APIs across the organization.

As BoConcept looks to the future, its strategy includes a continuous focus on improvement in key areas such as error handling and integration capabilities. The company places a high value on the agility offered by low-code environments and is actively seeking to empower end-users with enhanced error resolution tools within integration platforms. This forward-thinking approach underscores BoConcept’s unwavering commitment to innovation, operational excellence, and readiness to meet the evolving demands of future technology landscapes.

With Celigo as their iPaaS, BoConcept has been able to:

• Seamlessly connect and share data across 200+ applications, their master data management platform, and 300+ franchisees in 67 countries
• Efficiently manage and transfer large volumes of complex product data, ensuring consistency and accuracy across over 2 million product variations
• Leverage event-based integration and A2A automation to streamline processes and reduce manual efforts
• Ensure flexibility and scalability with support for multiple environments and connectivity across multiple SaaS and on-premises systems
• Empower business users with low-code tools for integration management and error resolution

By leveraging Celigo’s powerful integration capabilities, BoConcept is well-equipped to support its global franchise network and growth strategy, drive operational efficiency, and deliver a premium customer experience as it continues to expand and innovate in the luxury furniture industry.