GALERIA Kaufhof: Nearshore – Project success without limits

When the parent company METRO Group changed its fiscal year, the retail company GALERIA Kaufhof faced an unusual challenge − and had to act. Together with IBsolution, the project team adapted the information systems to the new requirements. A guarantee for success: nearshore.

Around two million people visit GALERIA Kaufhof’s 105 department stores and 17 sports stores across Germany every day. This is a business where speed is crucial to success. When METRO Group changed its financial year, the task for IT was to implement it on schedule.

Changes were necessary, especially for reporting. “We had to adapt our highly complex data models in SAP Business Warehouse,” explains Joachim Warntjen, Head of Information Systems at GALERIA Kaufhof. “That’s where experts had to come in.”

SAP partner IBsolution convinced with a nearshoring approach. A German-Bulgarian team of experts worked together on the IT conversion. A personal contact provided support on site in Cologne and acted as an intermediary. Within a very short time, the specialists analyzed all data models and converted them.

The challenge: There are numerous dependencies between the models and business logics. “If one model is changed, it can have an impact in a completely different place − and you may end up with the wrong figure in the financial statements,” Warntjen says. “The remote experts got it perfectly right.”

The result: The tight time and cost targets were even undercut − without compromising on quality.