Vorwerk: Transforming the person-to-person sales experience by digitalizing direct selling processes
Explore Vorwerk’s recipe for success
The world’s leading direct seller of premium household appliances, the Vorwerk Group is known for its Thermomix® kitchen appliance and Kobold cleaning systems. When innovating a digital direct sales solution, Vorwerk chose SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) to develop custom apps and used SAP Integration Suite to connect to back-end systems from SAP and third parties.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Retail | Wuppertal, Germany | 9,394 employees |
use of digitalized order entry and signature in selected countries.
of sales done digitally in 2023, up from 1% in 2018.
IT Product Owner, Vorwerk Group
Doubling-down a commitment to direct selling in a digital world
Known to millions of people all over the world for its Thermomix® and Kobold (also known as Bimby® and Folletto) brands, the Vorwerk Group is an internationally successful diversified family enterprise with heritage of over 40 years. With operations in more than 60 countries and a network of over 90,000 independent sales advisors, Vorwerk’s core business involves the development, production, and sale of its Thermomix® kitchen device and Kobold vacuum cleaners.
Vorwerk built its success through direct sales and by cementing customer relationships in most of the countries with product demonstration parties in people’s homes. With an unbroken commitment to direct selling, this 1883-founded family enterprise is now one of the world’s largest direct sales businesses. As a direct selling company, Vorwerk always seeks close contact with customers through its advisors who serve as the central point of all activities. In addition, the company operates e-commerce and physical stores in premium city center locations that also support the relationship between customers and sales advisors.
As part of a wide-ranging customer experience transformation initiative, Vorwerk was looking to align its high benchmark in product design and manufacturing excellence with new possibilities it could deliver in customer experiences. And looking to shore up efficiencies in its direct selling operations by digitalizing direct sales management processes, the company’s legacy monolithic architecture and nonstandardized practices across countries posed a considerable challenge. Unable to find a standard software offering to support its direct sales requirements on a global scale, Vorwerk made the decision to develop its own solution.
IT Product Owner and Technical Architect, Vorwerk Group
Custom-developing apps and managing integrations in an agile way
As a long-established customer of SAP, Vorwerk’s investment in SAP’s portfolio of cloud-based business applications allows it to digitalize recruit-to-hire, source-to-pay, design-to-operate, and lead-to-cash processes. With its business foundation built on SAP S/4HANA, its technology stack includes SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain, and SAP Customer Experience solutions.
Vorwerk liked the idea of innovating its own digital direct sales solution on SAP Business Technology Platform. This move would allow it to take advantage of SAP Integration Suite to connect the new solution to its back-end systems from SAP, as well as third-party applications, and manage APIs in a secure and scalable environment.
Drawing on a team of experts, the company set about developing highly strategic Web-based applications for its sales advisors, as depicted in the diagram below. Creating two modules, one for digital order entry and the other for leads management, Vorwerk initially developed the digital order entry app on SAP BTP for the Neo environment. To make the most of available functionality, the company migrated to SAP Integration Suite on SAP BTP for the Cloud Foundry environment to digitalize leads management. The company started developing with SAP HANA extended application services and SAPUI5 in 2018 and moved to SAP Cloud Application Programming Model in Node.js with microservices, SAPUI5, and SAP Fiori elements.
With the adoption of more digital solutions, Vorwerk needed to enable the flow of information between multiple applications to further improve business processes and deliver consistent experiences. To monitor and respond to a high volume of business events, the company chose the SAP event mesh capability. The capability supports event-driven architectures, allowing applications to communicate and respond to business events in real time. With this real-time visibility, changing business requirements can be met with greater agility.
Taking the delivery of exceptional service to the next level
Taking advantage of the intuitive innovation capabilities of SAP BTP and the powerful data integration capabilities offered by SAP Integration Suite, Vorwerk successfully custom-developed its own strategic direct selling management apps.
The custom-built applications VORyou and VORleads empower the company’s advisors in their daily business tasks across the sales cycle. The apps streamline and automate how advisors manage leads, their calendars, and sales-event activities to the point of placing and managing orders. In the background, integrations with SAP and third-party solutions—including contact and order data, address verifications, and banking checks—harmonize real-time data access while enforcing consumer data consent preferences.
With these powerful apps, Vorwerk’s advisors are spared from unnecessary paperwork and are more responsive to customer needs, thanks to an accelerated sales cycle. Since the implementation, Vorwerk has seen digitalization gains of 85% for its advisors and has increased efficiency by eliminating 100% of manual tasks from its sales process.
Continuing to strengthen competitive advantage
Vorwerk’s use of advanced technologies and best practices within agile, integrated business processes forms the foundation of its intelligent and sustainable enterprise.
As Vorwerk continues its digitalization journey, where the advisors are always at the center of every action, its commitment to developing customer relationships through product demonstrations and social events remains the company’s recipe for success. With SAP Integration Suite serving as the connectivity layer between its SAP solution landscape and third-party IT systems, Vorwerk can maximize opportunities to custom-develop apps to meet the unique goals of its business.
By continuing to integrate its enterprise data with external data sources, the company can create more fluid and secure experiences for customers and sales advisors alike, helping it stay ahead by continuously improving the user experience. What’s more, there’s minimal maintenance required from Vorwerk’s internal IT team.