Maxeda DIY Group: Reacting to change at speed with SAP on Google Cloud
About Maxeda DIY Group
Maxeda DIY Group is a retailer whose mission is to inspire and help people create their dream homes. The company offers a wide range of DIY products to customers across the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
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About Capgemini
Capgemini is an IT services and consulting company helping clients transform and manage their business with technology solutions.
Maxeda DIY Group migrated its SAP environments from on-premises to Google Cloud to unlock faster insights and opportunities within its ever-growing stores of business data.
Google Cloud results
- Speeds up SAP Business Warehouse environment reports, producing them in two hours instead of nine
- Supports easy and quick scalability to enable long-term transformations driven by data analytics
- Enables nimble flexibility, so that businesses can adapt to change without being constrained by technical infrastructure
Reduces time to insights by more than 70%
E-commerce is becoming a dominant market force, with 74% of consumers now using multiple channels to start and complete a transaction. But there's a challenge here for retailers, as they need to make their customers feel as though their shopping journeys, online and offline, are connected and consistent. DIY retailer Maxeda DIY Group relies on data analytics to ensure its customers are getting a seamless shopping experience.
"We're a data-driven, customer-first company, which means our aim is to provide the best possible experience to our 1.5 million customers, whether they're online or in any of our 341 stores across the Benelux region," explains Erik Cuypers, Group CDO and CIO, Maxeda DIY Group.
"We looked at long-term cost-efficiency and data capabilities, but the positivity of the Google Cloud team to make our migration a success also stood out. We were one of the first companies in Europe to complete a full, live SAP migration to Google Cloud, and we weren't disappointed."
—Erik Cuypers, Group CDO and CIO, Maxeda DIY GroupTo truly fulfill its mission of helping and inspiring people to create the home of their dreams, the company has been on a digital transformation journey since 2015. At its core is the aim to leverage data to better understand the ever-changing customer expectations and match them with the ability to refine business models and processes over time.
Maxeda DIY Group partnered with Capgemini to set up the required technological infrastructure, implementing SAP S/4HANA at its digital core. The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform allows the company to analyze business data in real time as it performs transactions and modifies existing business processes or creates new ones. Initially, Maxeda hosted this SAP-centered business environment on-premises, leaning on Capgemini to manage its own data center. But in 2021, when its legacy infrastructure contract expired, the retailer used the momentum to move away from that setup and leverage the services of a hyperscaler instead, selecting Google Cloud for the job.
"We looked at long-term cost-efficiency and data capabilities, but the positivity of the Google Cloud team to make our migration a success also stood out," says Cuypers. "We were one of the first companies in Europe to complete a full, live SAP migration to Google Cloud, and we weren't disappointed."
Setting the groundwork for more innovation
By migrating to Google Cloud, Maxeda is looking to build, deploy, and manage models that streamline SAP-based analytics outcomes on a centralized, scalable platform. Supported by Capgemini, Maxeda's new setup consists of a bespoke configuration model, where its IT and SAP services are located in different parts of the Google Cloud environment, with different security capabilities.
"The idea is to blend online and offline systems so we can gain a single view of our customers, products, stores, and services. Fast insights are necessary for us to better serve our customers with the ability to move fast and react as the world changes," says Cuypers. This mentality pays off as people's buying patterns change even more rapidly as they react to unpredictability.
"What we offer and how we manage our stock needs to change to accommodate new shopping patterns," explains Cuypers. "We had very good figures during the lockdown because people were investing in their homes. But macroeconomic trends in 2022 are leading people to be more cautious with their finances and spend less on things such as home DIY compared to 2021."
Consistent monitoring of such shifts in consumer behavior helps to inform Maxeda's business direction, stock, and logistics infrastructure. "That's why we asked Capgemini to help us get the insights we need, when we need them, in the form of reports," says Cuypers.
Being prepared for big, fast changes
While customer and supply chain data has been an integral part of Maxeda's business for years, the speed with which the company is able to use its data is changing. Although the move to Google Cloud is quite recent, the company is already seeing the benefits of a data repository system where data can be aggregated, exported, analyzed, and generated as business intelligence reports. "We did see a good improvement in time to insights for the SAP Business Warehouse environment, where we can now run reports in two hours instead of nine," says Maarten Ettema, SAP Solutions Architect, Capgemini.
"We did see a good improvement in time to insights for the SAP Business Warehouse environment, where we can now run reports in two hours instead of nine."
—Maarten Ettema, SAP Solutions Architect, CapgeminiAside from increased performance, the Maxeda team expects to see benefits resulting from the flexibility enabled by its new infrastructure. For example, the company is looking forward to using more Google Cloud services on top of its existing SAP solutions to continually improve its reporting and data analytics capabilities. Additionally, the ability to scale up and down as the business grows and continues to aggregate data is now much easier without the need to provision hardware, and this kind of nimble flexibility will be important in the future.
"The move to Google Cloud is an enabler - it will give us the capability to connect easily with new developers on the platform and make infrastructure upgrades as needed; which will help us innovate faster in the future."
—Maarten Ettema, SAP Solutions Architect, Capgemini"There will always be things that happen from a macroeconomic point of view that significantly impact our industry, and having technical agility and flexibility as a business will help Maxeda navigate whatever comes," says Ettema. "The move to Google Cloud is an enabler - it will give us the capability to connect easily with new developers on the platform and make infrastructure upgrades as needed; which will help us innovate faster in the future."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Maxeda DIY Group
Maxeda DIY Group is a retailer whose mission is to inspire and help people create their dream homes. The company offers a wide range of DIY products to customers across the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
About Capgemini
Capgemini is an IT services and consulting company helping clients transform and manage their business with technology solutions.