Context: From online to omnichannel
KoRo Handels GmbH is a broad-based food and technology company that is rethinking retail. For KoRo, the combination of online and offline business represents an important success factor. That is why the year 2021 was also marked by B2B expansion. Valuable partnerships with retail partners such as dm, Rewe, Alnatura, BUDNI, Müller, and tegut are particularly important for D2C brands.
Within a year, KoRo was able to achieve a permanent listing with two of Germany's largest retailers, Rewe and dm, and will be listing product bestsellers such as the "white almond paste" or the "Geile Schnitte" in around 4,000 stores of various partners throughout Germany by the end of 2021.
"The step into retail is important for us, because we want to introduce KoRo to new consumers and make it an offline experience for existing customers. Especially for new customers, smaller packs and snacks are important in retail to be introduced to our products and the concept of KoRo."
- COO Florian Schwenkert explains
Problem: Large manual effort in B2B business.
In the Direct-2-Consumer business, KoRo was able to process orders with store and warehouse management systems without any problems. However, the new complexity of the B2B business via the grocery trade, especially in sales and logistics, made system conversions necessary. For a brand with an omnichannel approach, it is important to have a meaningful overall view of the flow of goods and payments, regardless of the channel. Central to this is the introduction of an ERP system to handle all purchasing and sales processes.
While fully automated order processing is already "best practice" in e-commerce, brands like KoRo have to deal with supplier portals, e-mail, fax and telephone in B2B business. This difference often leads to unexpectedly high manual effort when entering orders and creating and sending delivery bills and invoices. At the same time, with each new B2B customer or increasing demand, invisible costs creep in due to increased personnel requirements - a massive "margin eater".
Solution: Fully automated B2B business
KoRo recognized the challenge early and implemented EDI before manual processes became the status quo.
KoRo uses sento for easy and resource-saving connectivity to B2B trading partners. Documents can be received and sent fully automatically and electronically. Orders are easily recorded in the system by sento and clear notifications help not to lose the overview. Outgoing documents are registered and sent to B2B customers in real time.
What used to take a few minutes per receipt is now no longer a task for the KoRo team. The economic advantage is clear: Sento transforms the variable costs of the order-to-cash process into fixed costs and leads to valuable margin advantages. Instead of manual tasks, the team can now focus on developing new products and new business relationships.
"Through sento, we were able to fully automate our order-to-cash process in a very short period of time, without having to dedicate our own resources to communicate with merchants or technical implementation."
- Florian Schwenkert
The critical part of any EDI implementation is usually not the connections to the retailers, but the master data quality of the supplier systems. Sento helps KoRo to store and maintain processes and master data such as product information, discounts and shipping addresses in a structured way. With each EDI message, KoRo's master data is automatically checked and improvements are suggested should data be missing or inconsistently stored.
Most important KoRo connections:
- dm (DE, AT, Online)
- Globus
- Rewe
- Edeka
- Bipa
- Müller
- Alnatura
- Billa
- Budni
- tegut
Software in use:
- Shopware (Shopsystem)
- Pixi (Warehousemanagement)
- Xentral (ERP / Buchhaltung)
- sento (Integrationsplatform)
Automate B2B business now
Sento supports suppliers and brands of the food trade in the optimization and automation of all essential business processes. We solve the challenge "EDI connection" without lengthy projects and at low cost. We extend the most common ERP systems (MS Dynamics, Oracle Netsuite, weclapp, Xentral, ...) for fully automated use in B2B business. You too can use sento and become a digital champion. → Arrange a meeting.