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#Management Systems

Purchase service system for the big Scandinavian marketplace

Home Furnishing Nordic needed an effective solution that would streamline the interaction with suppliers, facilitate supply chain management, and enhance the work with warehouses. Forbytes team built a purchase service tool that meets all these needs and enables the client to scale, grow the partnership, and ensure uninterrupted manager workflow.

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About Home Furnishing Nordic

Home Furnishing Nordic (HFN) is a Sweden-based marketplace that operates in the Scandinavian market. It holds several nationally-focused digital channels selling furniture & appliances. Launched in 2008, HFN now is one of the biggest ecommerce retailers in the focus industry. Its NET sales crossed $40 million in 2021, whereas the number of products offered by the client is more than 300 000.

HFN about

Client:

Home Furnishing Nordic

Location:

Sweden

Service type:

Custom purchase
service system

Team composition:

1 Tech Lead, 2 Back-End Engineers, 1 UI/UX Designer, 1 Front-End Engineer, 1 QA Engineer, 1 Business Analyst, 1 Project Manager

  • Leading online furniture and interior design store
  • #7 top online store of furniture and appliances in Sweden
  • $72.7 million NET sales in 2021
  • 400 000+ satisfied clients
  • $40 million in furniture and appliances sales in 2021
  • Owns 19 physical stores

Scope of the project

Home Furnishing Nordic is one of our long-term clients and partners. At this stage of our cooperation, the goal was to build a new purchase service system that would ease managers’ work with suppliers, purchase orders, and warehouses. The client needed an intuitive and user-friendly functionality for employees to manage orders, track supply chain progress, and speed up dropship delivery from a supplier to a customer. Our team of software product engineers built the functionality for purchase order management. With its help, managers can send orders to a supplier, track if the order is confirmed, exchange order documentation with the supplier, receive the payment and shipping information.

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Our purchase service is a tool connecting managers with suppliers and warehouses. Using one centralized system, they can keep track of order progress and react to delays or problems. The system helps managers prevent supply chain interruptions and make sure that the right products are in stock. To make the manager’s work more convenient, we built a dashboard with real-time order data. The dashboard displays data on pending, unprocessed, canceled, and unreceived orders. Instead of checking long order lists manually to detect issues, a manager uses the dashboard to work with the orders that need extra attention.

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Another important feature of the purchase service is the automated import of data from warehouses. Earlier, managers received warehouse reports on stock and had to check them manually to maintain the demand-supply balance and replenish the assortment. We integrated the system with warehouse management software and automated the function of reporting on the manager side. The system automatically creates purchase orders based on the received reports, which saves nearly 40 hours per week for HFN employees.

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Their Challenges

Our Solutions

The previous supply chain management system used by HFN was outdated and unable to process growing volumes of data. The client couldn’t grow the number of suppliers as it would lead to the system’s overload.

Our team of dedicated software engineers built a brand-new purchase service that is capable of managing unlimited volumes of data and opens new opportunities for flexibility, scalability, and growth.

1

Managers responsible for different categories of products found it difficult to keep track of orders. Mistakes and problems in orders led to delivery delays, incorrect calculations of expected delivery time, and lowered client satisfaction rates. To prevent this, managers had to go through endless order lists manually to detect mistakes and problems.

Forbytes built a dashboard that automatically displays data on orders that require the manager’s attention. This prevents the business from getting stuck with orders and provides managers with on-hand information on order progress, confirmation rates, the total amount of confirmed orders, etc.

2

HFN wanted to facilitate the work of managers that create orders, interact with suppliers and warehouses, track the progress, and make interventions when necessary. For this, managers needed a one-in-all solution for supply chain management that would be easy to use and flexible.

Our purchase service covers all steps of the interaction between managers, suppliers, and warehouses. HFN employees use the system to view the order lifecycle: they can request the order, receive a response, check shipment details, view payment info as well as receipts. etc.

3

Manual work with documentation was effort-consuming and ineffective for the client. Managers had to spend hours reviewing order lists, validating the documentation, and double-checking if there was no error which could cost time and money.

The client got a solution for purchase order management that automates document validation and informs managers if there are problems that lead to supply chain issues and can affect the client satisfaction rate.

4

Their Challenges

The previous supply chain management system used by HFN was outdated and unable to process growing volumes of data. The client couldn’t grow the number of suppliers as it would lead to the system’s overload.

1

Managers responsible for different categories of products found it difficult to keep track of orders. Mistakes and problems in orders led to delivery delays, incorrect calculations of expected delivery time, and lowered client satisfaction rates. To prevent this, managers had to go through endless order lists manually to detect mistakes and problems.

2

HFN wanted to facilitate the work of managers that create orders, interact with suppliers and warehouses, track the progress, and make interventions when necessary. For this, managers needed a one-in-all solution for supply chain management that would be easy to use and flexible.

3

Manual work with documentation was effort-consuming and ineffective for the client. Managers had to spend hours reviewing order lists, validating the documentation, and double-checking if there was no error which could cost time and money.

4

Our Solutions

Our team of dedicated software engineers built a brand-new purchase service that is capable of managing unlimited volumes of data and opens new opportunities for flexibility, scalability, and growth.

1

Forbytes built a dashboard that automatically displays data on orders that require the manager’s attention. This prevents the business from getting stuck with orders and provides managers with on-hand information on order progress, confirmation rates, the total amount of confirmed orders, etc.

2

Our purchase service covers all steps of the interaction between managers, suppliers, and warehouses. HFN employees use the system to view the order lifecycle: they can request the order, receive a response, check shipment details, view payment info as well as receipts. etc.

3

The client got a solution for purchase order management that automates document validation and informs managers if there are problems that lead to supply chain issues and can affect the client satisfaction rate.

4

Technologies we have used in this project

Backend

PHP
Laravel
Lumen

Frontend

Vue 2/Vuex
SCSS/LESS
Node.js
ESLint

CDN

Google Cloud CDN

Frontend vendor portal

Vue 3
Pinia
SCSS/LESS
Node.js
ESLint
Vuetify

Continuous integration

Jenkins
GitHub Actions

Database

MongoDB (Atlas)
Redis
ElasticSearch
MSSQL
MySQL

Cloud orchestration

Kubernetes (GKE)
Terraform

Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform

Virtualization

Docker

Other tools and integrations

Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Monitoring/Logs

New Relic

How We Add Value

01.Custom widgets

With the help of the dashboard function, managers see problematic orders that slow down the delivery of a product to the end user. There is a set of standard widgets created by our team for the manager’s convenience. They cover the most urgent problems such as pending orders, invoiced but not received orders, and so on. However, if managers responsible for a particular product category need a deeper look into the orders, they can create custom widgets and hide the automatic ones. Custom widgets cover all orders from one supplier or company, orders made on the same date, and more.

02.User-friendly order filtering

The system is used by managers to process more than 40 000 orders daily. Without effective functionality for filtering, it would take a lot of time for managers to find the needed order and detect problems. To facilitate their work, we created the function of applying filters to purchase orders. Managers can access orders based on the supplier, label, date, company, currency, storage, etc.

03.All-encompassing interaction with partners

We added the opportunity to get in touch with partners, suppliers, and warehouses using different types of protocols. Our software is integrated with other back-office solutions used by Home Furnishing Nordic via API. For the work and communication with suppliers, a wide range of protocols is used. These include API, XML, EDIFACT, CSV, and PDF document interchange for business. This ensures the system’s integrity in the client’s business ecosystem and adds flexibility for managers. There’s no need for them to use multiple solutions to ensure successful order fulfillment. Managers can find all the needed data in one hub, which saves them time for more urgent and strategic tasks.

04.Tutorials and instructions

Forbytes appreciates the trust the client puts in us. They often come to us with a new business need and we meet it with new functionality, feature, or add-on. This is how our system is constantly improving. When we introduce something new to the system, our team makes a video tutorial and informs the managers about new releases. Using the tutorials and instructions, the managers of HFN can easily learn how to use a new function and grasp the value it brings to their work. Besides, tutorials and instructions from Forbytes ease the onboarding process for newbies in HFN who have to learn how to use back-office software from scratch.

Future cooperation

Our cooperation with Home Furnishing Nordic continues. In the nearest future, we plan to move all vendors to the purchase service system and fully automate all supply chain flows. Besides, we are going to build a new service — a vendor portal. The service will be designed for use by suppliers. Using this tool, they will manage all order-related info directly in this system. Suppliers will check their orders, confirm or decline them, view order progress, create dispatch documents, and more.

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Forbytes has made us feel almost as if they were our own employees. The management has been available when I needed it, but I’ve been free to run projects directly with Forbytes’ developers the rest of the time. Because Forbytes works with a number of companies, there is a lot of knowledge-sharing between their teams. We wouldn’t have this if we simply employed in-house developers.

— Thomas Andersson | eCommerce Manager & CTO at Home Furnishing Nordic

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    Forbytes has a strong process-oriented way of leading the company, with good respect for themselves and their managers. They made a choice not to become too big but build slowly on more qualified people, which is paying off.

    Niklas Hammar

    Niklas Hammar

    COO & Business
    Development at Offerta.se

    Forbytes has established strong project management. Their entire team is knowledgeable about appropriate processes and project expectations.

    Julia Noack

    Julia Noack

    eCommerce Manager
    Motorsweden & Swebike

    The Forbytes team has been loyal and dedicated in their partnership. The team provides management as needed but allows flexibility for direct work with developers.

    Thomas Andersson

    Thomas Andersson

    Ecommerce Manager & CTO
    Trademax

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