KINGFISHER PLC
A strong network of partnerships As with any organisation , a network of partnerships is key to success . Kingfisher is no different , and is continuing to benefit from a number of selective partnerships . “ This is the fifth time I ' ve launched a marketplace in my life ,” says Van Oosten . “ The last time I had to do this , I had to build a lot of it myself . So , before we launched into developing such a solution ourselves , we had a good look around and I was very pleased to see that Mirakl had a good product , with a very good roadmap and solid funding .”
In addition to working with Mirakl for the rollout of B & Q ’ s marketplace , Kingfisher is also partnered with Fluent Commerce whose Order Management System enables a centralised view of inventory across locations , providing improved order
Casto Express store in Paris fulfilment , fewer cancelled orders and fewer customer support calls .
In November 2022 , Kingfisher also announced a partnership with Google Cloud to enhance the retailer ’ s digital capabilities .
By capitalising on Google Cloud ’ s infrastructure , platform services , and AI solutions , Kingfisher , its retail brands and customers see a number of benefits , including greater website uptime , better forecasting and improved personalisation .
“ With Google , the question was threefold ,” comments Van Oosten . “ First of all , you need to get some speed . To gain speed , it ' s much better to port most of your applications , including SAP , to the cloud . Once you do that , say you have automated DevOps for example , you don ' t need to have your own environments , which are always a bottleneck when you want to do testing , and you have better security as well .
“ You also end up with exposure of your data in a much easier way because of the big query nature of Google ,” he adds . “ You are also attracting better talent , because they want to work with these types of tools , rather than very old mainframe types of applications .”
As Van Oosten explains , for Kingfisher it is hugely important to build selective partnerships , with organisations that share the same values .
“ Some of these things do not work if you have a different value set , so if an organisation is not engineering product and customer-led . If an organisation doesn ' t quite understand the importance of scalability and instant availability in real-time , or if they ' re not flexible in the way that the technology has been set up with auto-scaling , there is no point in starting a conversation .
158 March 2023