Challenge

As one of Europe's fastest growing accessory brands, Kapten & Son needed to future-proof their operations and IT system to meet their ambitious growth targets.

Kapten & Son faced significant challenges due to their fragmented IT landscape for retail and e-commerce, which consisted of a combination of in-house software, Excel sheets, and off-the-shelf solutions for their business operations. This fragmented approach presented several obstacles in their pursuit of doubling their revenue in the next 3-5 years. The existing system lacked scalability and flexibility, impeding the company‘s ability to support long-term growth targets and adapt to a dynamic business environment. For instance, capturing market opportunities through influencer campaigns became cumbersome due to the system‘s limitations.

The reliance on manual and fragmented processes resulted in errors, low productivity, and a lack of transparency across different channels and systems. To achieve their revenue goals and overcome these obstacles, Kapten & Son recognized the need for a comprehensive solution that would provide scalability, flexibility, and improved integration across their entire business ecosystem. The company aimed to implement a unified system that would reduce manual processes, enhance transparency, and optimize productivity to support its ambitious growth targets.

Strategy

Kapten & Son turned to Actindo and implemented their Digital Operations Platform to address their challenges and streamline their operations and IT system. Actindo‘s Core1 platform became the central component of Kapten & Son‘s retail and e-commerce architecture, providing a comprehensive solution to future-proof their operations. Actindo‘s Digital Operations Platform offers Kapten & Son a modular e-commerce ERP solution based on MACH architecture (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless).

Additionally, Actindo provides a data and process hub that enables seamless orchestration and automation of business processes through a low code approach. The project took 4 months from start to finish, and by integrating Actindo, Kapten & Son achieved a lean, scalable, transparent, automated, and stable process backbone. The platform allowed Kapten & Son to unify all their sales channels and connect with various providers for fulfillment and payment, creating a bestof-breed architecture tailored to their specific needs.

Method

Through the Actindo Process Orchestration, built on microservices, Kapten & Son gained the flexibility to adapt and optimize their business processes within hours, even during peak sales periods like Black Friday. During these peak sales periods, Kapten & Son successfully adjusted and optimized their business processes on an hourly basis, reacting to buyer behavior and market situation.

All integrations to the third-party logistics provider, Webshop system, payment provider, and returns portal were implemented through APIs to create central monitoring in Actindo. This allows real-time visibility into all processes and improved transparency as well as the ability to optimize processes.

Kapten & Son successfully applied Actindo‘s solutions and modules for a wide range of use cases including:

• Manage their stocks and product data
• Transfer their orders from the shop to Actindo and orchestrate them
• Settle payments with various payment providers
• Hand over orders to fulfillment partners
• Inform their outbound mailing system about order status and changes
• Register customer returns and send notifications to fulfillment partners and more

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