Tokmanni is the largest and only nationwide general discount retailer in Finland. It has over 190 stores, over 4000 employees, and over a billion euros revenue.
Business Goals
Tokmanni is the largest nationwide variety discount retailer in Finland. Even with the current market situation impacted by Covid-19, Tokmanni is growing in both traditional brick-and-mortar stores and on the web, breaking the one billion euros revenue in 2020. The earliest stores, which are now part of the Tokmanni chain, were established in the '70s, and growth has been steady ever since. As a company with over 30 years of IT history, Tokmanni had many legacy systems and integrations between those systems developed for the need case-by-case.
As always, legacy is a burden. At some point, 80% of the resources, own and external, were dedicated to solving problems that arise from piece-by-piece integrations. In their renovated cloud-oriented strategy, Tokmanni decided to change that - with help from Frends.
80% of our IT resources in integration went to operating and ensuring integrations work. Only 20% of the time, we developed something new. With Frends, we transformed that into 80% of development and only 20% is required for Ops.
Toni Eriksson, IT Manager, Tokmanni
Integration Challenges
As one could guess, a retail chain with decades of history had many on-premises systems glued together with tools of different times. The challenge to migrate these to Frends iPaaS wasn't technical - it was the time of IT and business people. So how to find the one who knew why and how these worked? How to redesign the processes to be more resilient and reusable?
Composable processes and business functions
Tokmanni's new integration processes are composable. A composable process, for example, is composed of parts like the "Order to WMS" process, which is now a reusable component that is parametrized in the process executes. In addition to reusable pieces of processes, Tokmanni began to implement reusable business functions, also known as internal and external business APIs. Frends iPaaS supports reusable business parts, visual low-code approach, API hosting and API management. All of which are features required to make this productivity leap.
With Frends, Tokmanni could also enable IT admins and Business IT users to create integrations and, most importantly, monitor and see everything occurring within their critical business processes. Transparency results from Frends low-code approach and "coding" language, a standard and familiar process definition language from Microsoft Visio and other products with BPMN2.0 support.
Hybrid architecture paves the way to the cloud.
Tokmanni's new strategy is cloud-oriented. Therefore, for new business applications, Tokmanni chose only cloud-native systems. As in any enterprise of this size, all the systems cannot be changed in a big bang. Therefore, Frends' ability to support hybrid architecture is crucial. Systems can be part of overall process integration and automation in on-premises or cloud without the burden of making the firewall look like Swiss cheese.
Results
- Reusable components, APIs, and reusable process parts have reduced implementation costs.
- Production problem-solving time is 12 times faster (from 6h to 30min).
- 80% Operations and 20% development transformed to 80% of development and 20% of operations.
- "Frends offered us peace of mind, we can trust that the Frends works and even when something is wrong in our systems, we can rely on Frends, that any problem is just a minor obstacle and solved fast."
In the end - with cost-efficient enabling of digitalization and automation - Tokmanni ensures that it can be ahead of competitors in consumer prices.