ORGANIZATION

The Quality Group, based in Hamburg, Germany, manufactures and distributes the popular nutrition brands ESN, More Nutrition, and Foodist. The fast-growing company, which is jointly owned by its founders and CVC Capital Partners, currently boasts more than €450 million in annual sales.

CHALLENGES
Several factors were making The Quality Group's fulfillment process increasingly complex, necessitating the implementation of a new order management system. First, the company plans to continue expanding their offering by acquiring and developing new nutrition brands on a regular basis – requiring a flexible, composable, and scalable solution stack.

The company also regularly offers flash sales, adding significant complexity to their inventory management requirements. The platform needed to be able to scale in response to a sudden surge in orders during those sales, while maintaining detailed, real-time visibility into the location and availability of all stock. The Quality Group also works with social media influencers to promote its products, placing unique demands on their fulfillment process. When a new product is launched, influencers need to receive it the same day so they can promote it immediately, requiring a system that can delineate and manage a complex array of order priority levels. A new order management system was also urgently needed due to the company's rapid growth. While The Quality Group had previously kept all stock in a single warehouse, things were made significantly more complex when they added a second – and since then, two more warehouses have been added to the mix. To respond to this added complexity, after attempting to implement Fluent Order Management internally, The Quality Group turned to Ayata to manage the implementation. Speed was extremely important to them, both to respond quickly to the challenges they faced and to realize the value of the new deployment as rapidly as possible.

SOLUTIONS

IMPROVED FULFILLMENT LOGIC

Ayata developed a customized and flexible Fluent implementation in which the distribution of products between warehouses is easily managed in real time, prioritizing selection of stock based on location while easily handling pre-orders, back-orders, split orders, and rapid influencer shipments.

FULLY COMPOSABLE

At The Quality Group's request, Ayata provided a unique implementation that enables all new functionality to be switched on and off as needed – allowing them, for example, to go live with the addition of a new warehouse that's expected to open a month later, test it comprehensively, and then switch it back off until that warehouse is ready to go live.

AN AGILE AND TRUSTED PARTNER

The Quality Group needed Ayata to be flexible enough to respond to rapidly changing needs while actively collaborating in a close partnership. "I really like working with the Ayata team," The Quality Group's Marcel Schneider said. "They're always involved, always supportive – and we move fast, changing priorities a lot."
RESULTS
Ayata's extensive experience in managing rapid deployments meant that The Quality Group's urgently needed Fluent implementation was seamlessly integrated into The Quality Group's solutions stack within three weeks.
The new system's ability to scale in response to flash sales was soon verified by a Black Week sale during which The Quality Group easily processed a surge of 250,000 orders in a single day.
Thanks to Ayata's implementation of Fluent, The Quality Group can now confidently manage ongoing and rapid growth.

Testimonials

Marcel Schneider
Expert for Order Management, Warehouse management and automation
The Quality Group
"We're growing by at least 100 percent per year – and with the setup from last year, we wouldn’t have been able to deal with the situation this year," Schneider said. "That is what Fluent enabled."