toom: Crafting user-friendly applications to help vendors deliver for the company
Explore toom’s journey with SAP
DIY retailer toom Baumarkt GmbH (toom) understands better than most that you need the right tools to do a great job. Equipped with software including SAP Build Work Zone, it created a flexible and user-friendly vendor portal on SAP Business Technology Platform, showing how doing it yourself can enhance efficiency, control, and the user experience.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Retail | Cologne, Germany | 18,000 employees |
faster onboarding of new vendors.
minutes saved on each goods receipt with automated document creation.
Chief Product Owner Order to Cash, toom Baumarkt GmbH
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Retail | Cologne, Germany | 18,000 employees |
faster onboarding of new vendors.
minutes saved on each goods receipt with automated document creation.
Chief Product Owner Order to Cash, toom Baumarkt GmbH
Equipping vendors with the tools to work nimbly and efficiently
When DIY enthusiasts across Germany seek the materials and tools they need to turn their ideas into reality, many of them head to a toom Baumarkt store.
Part of REWE Group, one of Europe’s leading trade and tourism groups, toom has a network of more than 300 stores plus an online shop. To keep stocked with a variety of products from more than 1,000 suppliers, the company needs a robust platform on which vendors can carry out tasks such as confirming orders, transmitting shipping notifications for inbound deliveries, and processing customer returns. With its deep respect for DIYers who tackle projects themselves, toom wanted to replace its third-party vendor portal with a platform built and managed in-house to gain greater control, flexibility, and return on investment as well as to to improve communication, visibility, and speed.
The new portal would reduce the effort involved in procurement, goods receipt, and invoice verification by digitalizing processes and linking advanced shipping notifications (ASNs) to purchase orders (POs). It would allow vendors to confirm POs and upload invoices. Vendors would also be able to create ASNs and transfer them to the software back-end system for goods receipt, enabling an overview of confirmed deliveries and helping standardize logistics processes. A further requirement was to provide efficient and more-secure document archiving for invoices and information on vendor stock availability.
Simplifying the vendor experience with an intuitive portal
Already having a close relationship with SAP and recognizing the software company’s deep retail industry know-how, toom decided to build its new vendor portal on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) using SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Integration Suite, and SAP BTP, Cloud Foundry environment. This project took place as part of a broader group-wide SAP BTP initiative working with NTT DATA.
Another key building block of the project was SAP Build Work Zone, standard edition, a digital workplace experience that helps users create business sites for centralized access to business application information across diverse devices.
toom used a range of tools and services from SAP when building the portal, including:
SAP Business Application Studio
SAP Cloud Application Programming Model
SAPUI5
Authorization Management service
SAP HANA Cloud
Identity Authentication service
Identity Provisioning service
The company also took advantage of SAP Services and Support to support an agile development approach. Provided within the context of toom’s SAP S/4HANA implementation, these services spanned front-end and architecture design, development of side-by-side extensions, weekly feedback meetings, solution training, and handover sessions.
Enhancing communication and efficiency in a connected IT landscape
Having rolled out its new portal to an initial group of 28 suppliers, toom now has full control over a digitalized, flexible, and transparent vendor tool. By connecting the portal with its ERP landscape using SAP Integration Suite, toom has streamlined information exchange between systems, improving data quality and access and enhancing the user experience. The new portal has improved communication with vendors, increased employee and vendor productivity, and enabled faster response times and more-efficient operations.
As well as an administration application used by its own employees to map vendor numbers to internal ERP systems, toom has built three initial applications for vendors:
An order confirmation application lets vendors access a list of orders—a vendor can approve or decline an order or change details such as delivery date or amount of goods.
A shipping notification application allows the vendor to create a shipping note after order approval to communicate details, including shipping company, tracking number, and expected delivery date, to toom.
A returns application supports drop-shipment orders in which the vendor delivers goods directly to customers without toom’s involvement. When a customer decides to return these goods, the application informs toom when the vendor has received the items, triggering a refund.
Vendor feedback has been extremely positive, with suppliers citing the intuitive user interface and straightforward functionality as benefits of the new portal. As a result, the company is planning to roll out additional apps and features.
Exploring further applications and rolling out to new users
The positive feedback received from vendors has encouraged toom to open the portal to additional users, with plans to bring more suppliers on board and connect store employees directly with vendors through the portal and additional applications.
Now that it has control over the portal’s development, toom also plans to expand the tool’s functionality. For example, it wants to build a contact data application using elements of the SAP Fiori user experience.
And toom is also considering expanding the portal from a single-tenant basis to a multitenant software-as-a-service system so other subsidiaries within REWE Group can benefit from the streamlined, intuitive experience toom’s vendors already enjoy.
Want to know more about toom?
toom: Driving Transformation with a Standardized Approach to Integration (SAP Business Transformation Study)