Elkjøp: Taking event-driven architecture to the next level to shore up real-time responsiveness in an omnichannel world
Explore Elkjøp’s journey with SAP
Elkjøp Nordic AS, a consumer electronics and home appliances retailer, realized its vision for next-generation retail using SAP Customer Experience solutions. Looking to take order handling to another level, it used SAP Integration Suite on SAP BTP, Cloud Foundry environment to create an event-driven architecture to satisfy customer expectations.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Retail | Oslo, Norway | >11,000 employees |
tenants for 500 interfaces, down from 17 tenants.
messages processed daily through SAP Integration Suite.
from placing on online order to pickup in store
Team Lead, Integration, Elkjøp Nordic AS
Leading the way with customer experience and business efficiencies
Omnichannel retailer Elkjøp Nordic AS is a solid market leader for consumer electronics and home appliances in Nordic countries, serving customers both online and through more than 400 stores across the region. With a customer-first corporate culture, Elkjøp delivers a frictionless customer experience across unified channels.
To serve its customers in this way, Elkjøp followed a cloud-first strategy and realized its vision for next-generation retail customer experience using SAP Customer Experience solutions and the SAP ERP and SAP Customer Activity Repository applications. The customer- and employee-facing front ends are facilitated in the back end by the SAP Service Cloud solution for processes connected to services, repairs, installations, capacity handling, and support tickets. The SAP Marketing Cloud solution processes insight-based marketing campaigns. And the SAP Commerce Cloud solution serves as the core engine in Elkjøp’s online channel.
Elkjøp adopted SAP Integration Suite as the basis for central integration. This setup takes a cloud-first approach and includes a front-end architecture that delivers high availability. Several high-volume event-driven requirements are met with a microservices-based architecture.
SAP ERP is used as the core for managing transactional and financial processes, with SAP Customer Activity Repository providing a unified view of customer activity across channels. This gives Elkjøp a sustainable foundation with flexibility to support subscription business models and introduce more self-service capabilities for customers, allowing it to deliver exceptional customer experiences across online and in-store channels.
The company originally configured its lead-to-cash process using SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and the Open Connectors, Event Mesh, API Management, and Cloud Integration capabilities of SAP Integration Suite on SAP BTP, Neo environment. With advancements in event-driven architecture, as Elkjøp wanted to stay ahead in the evolving omnichannel retail environment, it sought to adapt its landscape to further enhance operational agility and reduce order cycle times.
Team Lead, Integration, Elkjøp Nordic AS
Powering instant reactions to every customer interaction
To further improve omnichannel order management and support planning applications, Elkjøp remastered its enterprise integration architecture using SAP Integration Suite on SAP BTP, Cloud Foundry environment. This move allowed the company to mitigate cost and complexity by reducing the number of tenants it required to three tenants, one tenant per environment, with 500 integrations running on a single tenant.
In its omnichannel environment, online orders from B2B and B2C transactions, as well as those coming from the point-of-sale (POS) systems in its physical stores, generate five million messages every day. Using the Event Mesh capability through SAP Integration Suite connected to a service bus on Microsoft Azure, Elkjøp created an event-driven architecture around order handling.
This allows the company to give customers real-time updates on inventory levels or shipping status, as its applications respond instantly to events triggered by other systems in its landscape. This helps it keep up with customer expectations.
Mirko Adamovic, integration team lead at Elkjøp, comments on the value of this setup on SAP BTP for the Cloud Foundry environment. “There’s immediate visibility at the point of sale that an order went through and what the order looks like. The user interface of the POS systems also allows orders to be retrieved from SAP Customer Activity Repository through the API Management capability offered by SAP Integration Suite. When this information flows to the ERP, other systems are updated immediately, including the warehouse to revise inventory and item availability.”
Team Lead, Integration, Elkjøp Nordic AS
Doubling down on delivering legendary omnichannel experiences
Elkjøp’s next-generation retail project on event-driven architecture has delivered value for the company on many levels. Underpinned by real-time data sharing that helps support relationships with its customers, the company manages high-volume events and high-velocity data in real time with a minimum time lag. This puts Elkjøp in a strong position to satisfy customers’ sky-high service expectations straddling online and offline worlds.
Adamovic explains, “We handle 50 million API calls and up to five million events every day. With approximately 90% of our messages flowing through the event-driven architecture, we get a real-time view that we can combine with other data in real time. Applications respond instantly to events triggered by other systems in our landscape, and those systems are automatically updated the moment an order is placed. This allows us to offer customers the ability to collect their online orders in store, just 30 minutes after placing the order.”
In addition, through the self-service capabilities Elkjøp offers, customers can cancel or change an order themselves, saving them the effort of contacting the customer service team over the phone or by e-mail. Again, through the event-driven architecture, their actions automatically cascade to other interested services.
Adamovic comments, “Users of the search engine on our website can view accurate information on whether a product is in stock at a particular store. Previously, we could only re-index the cache once every day, and this time lag could negatively impact the customer experience. Now whenever there’s a change, re-indexing is immediate.”
The new architecture is also supporting Elkjøp’s foray into circular business models based on refurbished products, leasing, renting, and product-as-a-service solutions. For example, used products can now be offered for resale within the same online shopping experience created for new products. As well as being good for the environment, the company no longer needs showroom space for used items, saving physical storage space and used-product handling requirements in the store. And using the SAP Subscription Billing solution, Elkjøp offers customers the ability to purchase mobile phones, computers, and other products through lease agreements and pay them off over time.
Team Lead, Integration, Elkjøp Nordic AS
Sharpening its competitive edge through real-time data distribution
Elkjøp is now working on reconfiguring the service-bus setup with the Event Mesh capability and decoupling the event broker from SAP Integration Suite.
In addition, the company is currently evaluating using SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh as a potential message broker once the company has transitioned to advanced ERP in the cloud. Adamovic comments, “SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh has a unique capability for message distribution and a lot of available connectors. This technology has the potential to help simplify some of our existing real-time implementations.”
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