The design icon Bang & Olufsen has renewed focus on digital cohesion, from production all the way to retail outlets all over the world. Data and digital tools play a key role in creating what B&O’s CIO, Jonas Dan Jørgensen, calls ‘retail in a box’.
B&O has been through a comprehensive turnaround in its business in recent years. New initiatives have been started and new ways of collaboration created. And many new employees have joined; in fact the workforce grew by 10% last year.
One of them is Jonas Dan Jørgensen, who was tasked in June 2021 with developing a robust IT foundation geared to scale the business all the way from factory to outlet.
– B&O has moved 99% of its IT setup to the cloud, and we now need to modernize the application landscape. Some of our applications are over 15 years old. It’s this digital transformation, amongst other things, that I’m heading, explains Jørgensen.
One of his primary tasks is to ensure digital cohesion across B&O’s online and offline sales channels to create a seamless quality experience for customers.
Digital cohesion
B&O sells products online, through its own high street outlets and franchise stores. But it’s only in what the organization calls ‘COCO outlets’ (company owned, company operated) that standard IT systems are used to provide insight into valuable customer data, which the outlets can use to improve and control the customer experience, a key element of the company’s strategy.
Franchise stores can choose themselves which IT systems they want to support sales and the customer experience. And this is where Jørgensen sees a great potential for supporting them even more, including through standardization:
– There’s still an enormous potential for us and our retail partners in standardizing data, sales and customer behaviour. Channelling, streamlining and supporting sales becomes easier, because we get to understand the purchasing patterns of our customers. That’s why we’re working with what I call ‘retail in a box’, which provides more standardized IT support to the outlets.
His ambition is to achieve one-way gathering and storage of customer data. That will allow the IT department to make an ever greater contribution of valuable customer data and real-time overview of stock levels to the thousands of outlets, so that digital initiatives such as click & collect can be extended across all B&O dealers. The ultimate aim is to enhance the individual customer experience.
– I believe there is massive value for our own store managers and franchisees in us standardising the IT setup through solid CRM systems. Because that gives them and us insight that can be actively used to improve the way we manage the business, and the customer experience in particular. Our customers expect natural interplay between physical and digital channels. And that’s something IT can help ensure.
By increasing that interplay, the need to provide a stable, transparent value chain increases, all the way from the software team in Lyngby and the aluminium factory in Struer to a high-end store in Singapore or London. Jørgensen believes IT has a key role to play here:
– In simple terms, IT can connect all the links in the value chain. We can contribute to optimum distributions and supplier management, and to a stable pipeline of products that will ensure production can meet demand on the 70+ markets B&O operates on.
