Australia’s Kogan.com breaks IT silos

Data integrity

Taft reveals that although some attempts were made to build connectors between its systems to facilitate data flows, Kogan.com still needed the data integrity that only an ERP system such as SAP Business One could provide.

“We are shipping millions of parcels a year and we need to keep our customers happy,” he says. “To do that, we can’t have ad-hoc systems connected via a range of connectors. We need a central platform to ensure our accounts are correct and all the orders are processed.”

Instead of using the traditional Waterfall method of developing and deploying software, Kogan.com chose to roll out SAP Business One in just three months. Taft says that although the deployment was challenging, the IT team was able to tackle issues in an agile manner, rather than take years to get systems up and running.

“We have a very talented development team that collaborates closely with our implementation partners,” he says. “We are also very hands-on in our development work, writing and reviewing code based on our deep understanding of how things are run. We have also avoided a lot of communication issues because we sat together.”

In getting buy-in from its internal stakeholders, Kogan.com identified a product champion in each business team and prioritised requests in an agreed order. It also conducted training sessions for users and worked closely with stakeholders early in the deployment cycle.

Although Kogan.com’s ERP system – hosted on Amazon Web Services – is a live project it is working on constantly as the business grows, it is already seeing improvements in areas such as customer service. It used to take more than a day – sometimes days – to respond to customer enquiries, but it can now do so in under an hour.

“We have been able to grow our customer base, sales and portfolio of businesses dramatically without a massive increase in headcount,” says Taft. “We have also integrated customer satisfaction scores into the purchasing process, so if a product is not rated highly by customers, the buying team needs to get approval to reorder it from suppliers.”

To make it easy for suppliers to do business with Kogan.com, the company has integrated its system with that of its suppliers, says Taft. “We have so many suppliers and we don’t expect them to use SAP other than ourselves. It tends to be faster to build the integration rather than train suppliers on our system.”