Digitisation along the Supply Chain

The Story

CLD Distribution is a leading distributor based in Belgium and brings various product range to market but focus mainly on video games, audio consumer electronics, computer peripherals and board games. CLD has been growing at a high pace. The application landscape was initially made for start-ups and optimized to maximum agility at low costs. For the next steps in the company’s value creation process, a stronger and more scalable solution was required. PROCOMM consulted CLD on a digital strategy for ongoing growth and supported them hands-on in the transition phase.

The Solution

In the market of video games, audio consumer electronics and similar there are big players involved such as Microsoft and Sony as vendors and Carrefour and Mediamarkt as resellers. What do both vendors and resellers have in common? They strongly insist on their highly standardised Terms & Conditions. This makes it hard to impossible for them to engage from a commercial and logistics standpoint. This is where CLD comes in. Due to its agility CLD managed to get in between, build the bridge and satisfy needs from both vendors and resellers.

The previous application landscape (simplified):

How to sustain this strategic asset as the company grows rapidly and faces new significant challenges?

The digital strategy for CLD consisted of three primary pillars: Strategy, Organisation, Technology.

On the strategic level, an optimised balance between different strategic priorities was considered and decided upon.
On an organisational level, new team structures, processes and methodologies were identified.
On a technology level, a scalable architecture was identified to facilitate strategic and organisational goals.

The actual plan was optimised from as financial perspective to ensure that the planned changes would not conflict with liquidity needs of the continued growth of the company.

The Result

The digital transformation has been achieved within 12 months time. An internal development team in Belgium has been successfully staffed and put into operations. Coaching involvement has been reduced gradually and phased out, therefore CLD remains fully independent from PROCOMM.

The new application landscape (simplified):

9 mission-critical business applications have been successfully re-developed onto the new scalable architecture. In average every second month a new app has been successfully introduced into the organisation that was operating under full load during this period of growth. CLD is ready for the next phase of growth.