International Planning for Retail

 The Situation

Tchibo products are with people from their first cup of coffee in the morning
through their dinner in the evening. In keeping with its slogan, “Every week a
new world”, Tchibo offers its customers up to 30 products each week (roughly 1,800
a year) in 1,200 retail outlets and over 60,000 food and specialty shops. They
also ship nationally and internationally and have an Internet presence. This variety
of offers and an ever-increasing expansion of retail stores gave the internal
IT systems team quite a challenge: how to optimally develop and synchronize an
IT system when the purchasing unit is centralized and the sales unit is decentralized.

The Solution

Capgemini sd&m and Tchibo together developed the PLATIN (Planning Tchibo
International Non Food) System. With PLATIN, planning for country-specific product
offers is much easier, allowing faster use of country specific distribution channels
and enabling Tchibo to serve new markets quickly.

The Result

Complete cooperation between the teams assures that critical business information
and know-how is transferred to the right individuals. Because of an incremental
development procedure, new requirements for an emerging application tied to ongoing
internationalization can be immediately considered. And instead of three different
legacy systems, Tchibo is now using only one modern Windows NET-Basis application.
With this solid and future-oriented system, Tchibo is optimally prepared to extend
its market prominence and gain new customers, worldwide.