EXECUTIVE BIO

JJ has substantial expertise in leading digital transformations in consumer branded and retail companies. He is the former Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Kingfisher where he lead ecommerce, digital platforms, marketplaces, data and technology. He joined Kingfisher from Danish toy company, The LEGO Group, where as Chief Digital Officer, he led the company’s digital ambition to make ecommerce the largest part of the business. Prior to this he was a member of the Board of REWE Group and CEO of REWE Digital, where he oversaw all aspects of the digital agenda, including e-commerce operations, technology infrastructure and digital marketing. With his team, he designed and built a digital ecosystem which linked physical and digital channels via mobile and AI technology and launched continental Europe’s first automated food fulfilment centre. REWE is now the largest grocery ecommerce player with its home delivery and click and collect fulfilled from either stores or automated fulfilment centres. He also led the investment in Commercetools which is now the world’s leading ecommerce platform. JJ has also held leadership roles at companies including Tesco and Travis Perkins.

Fluent Order Managements drives real-time business and customer benefits

Jamie Cairns, Chief Strategy Officer at Fluent Commerce, on how its order management platform enhances operational efficiency and customer experience.

Fluent Commerce is a global software company focused on distributed order management. Its cloud-native platform, Fluent Order Management, provides accurate and near real-time inventory data visibility, order orchestration, fulfilment optimisation, instore pick and pack, customer service, and reporting to transform fulfilment into a competitive advantage.

As Jamie Cairns, Chief Strategy Officer at Fluent Commerce explains, the process of managing orders begins with inventory data. “Being able to unify a view of inventory and then syndicating that inventory data out across a range of different channels lets you improve the customer experience,” Cairns comments.

That, in turn, has a range of different operational efficiency benefits, reducing costs by reducing split shipments, cancelled orders, and customer service calls.

As Cairns describes, order management represents an opportunity for retailers and B2B organisations to harness inventory data to provide real-world benefits. One of their recent innovations, Fluent Big Inventory, is about unifying in near real-time those inventory sources, enabling all systems to become inventory aware.

“It is not just about enhancing the order fulfilment process, which is typically what has been the domain of an order management system,” Cairns explains. “It’s about making inventory data available to other systems, like search, as well and ultimately being able to personalise search results based on inventory.” With changing customer preferences in recent years, brands have had to adapt quickly. As Cairns explains, Fluent Order Management not only provides a robust software-as-a-service platform, but at a lower total cost so businesses can move quickly and meet customer expectations efficiently.

During the COVID-19 pandemic when stores were closed, Fluent Order Management enabled businesses to adapt quickly. “Stores still had inventory and there were huge spikes in online demand,” Cairns explains. “Our customers were able to adapt in a matter of a day to completely change their fulfilment workflows.

“Digital agility is essential,” he concludes. “We are not trying to predict what the future is, but to provide a toolset that allows you to adapt as the future evolves.”

For retailers, it is important to strike a balance and still provide customers with a seamless shopping experience. As the consulting firm McKinsey says, offering a compelling omnichannel experience is no longer a luxury but a requirement for survival. Most Gen Z consumers don’t even think in terms of traditional channel boundaries, research has shown, and they increasingly evaluate brands and retailers on the seamlessness of their experience.

Kingfisher is in a strong position, with their extensive presence of stores meaning customers always have the best choice available to them. As Van Oosten explains, combining digital experiences with an extensive network of stores in a seamless way ensures that customers are satisfied.

“Our stores are not a liability, they are co-assets, and we are lucky to have them,” he comments.

“Home improvement can be a complex journey for customers because they might have questions. Which piece of equipment do I need to buy? How are you going to make sure that the wood in a pack of flooring is the right one? If you have underfloor heating, how do you assemble it? How do you make sure you have the right quantity?

“All of these questions require some really deep expertise, which we have in our stores,” he adds.

By having a local presence, Kingfisher’s outlets can also utilise click-and-collect services, in a move towards stores becoming ‘micro-fulfilment centres’.

“When you want to have access to things quite quickly, that requires a local presence by definition,” Van Oosten adds. “We are lucky to have those stores so we can offer click-and-collect. In that respect, instead of it being experiencebased or knowledge-based, our stores are far more like micro-fulfilment centres. And if we want to go to customers quite quickly, when they require a service from something like Screwfix Sprint where we have over 800 stores now in the UK, we can do so in under one hour. And that is phenomenal.”

The success of B&Q’s marketplace model

Since launching last March, B&Q’s marketplace has been a real success story. The company reported in September 2022

Mirakl offers the industry's first and most advanced enterprise marketplace SaaS Platform

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100,000+ third-party products found / 200 Curated Sellers

THE WORLD'S LEADING BRANDS CHOOSE MIRAKL that it was performing ahead of expectations, with sales from partner brands representing 8% of its online sales that month.

“Across the whole planet, there are around 179,000 merchants and about 24 million SKUs (stock keeping units) in home improvement,” Van Oosten comments. “At B&Q we had about 35,000 SKUs compared to a range of four and seven million SKUs across the UK.”

Developed in partnership with enterprise marketplace SaaS platform Mirakl, B&Q’s marketplace offering expands existing ranges and adds new categories, utilising the brand’s famous ‘diy.com’ website.

Marketplaces are growing in popularity with consumers, with nearly half (48%) of online product searches now starting on marketplace platforms in key markets including the UK and US, according to Inriver. Within six months of launching the marketplace, an extra 100,000 products via selected third-party sellers had been made available to customers.

“When you have a URL called diy.com, customers expect a high-quality product coming from trusted merchants,” Van Oosten explains.

“We have a lot of traffic online and in stores, and so from a business perspective, it's logically the next step to enrich your economic model with another line of income, which is a commission-based business. And then once you have that marketplace, you can continue in that journey around monetisation. You can offer click-and-collect, and you can offer returns.

“Customers don't like to wait at home for their parcels,” he adds. “They don't like the return process, which can be quite a cumbersome process by other players. So having stores is helpful, too.”

“In the marketplace, for example, we are thinking how can we scale it faster? Which type of functionalities can we have, which type of business model can we use to evolve it even faster in the UK?”

Using data to provide the best experience for customers

To bring these experiences to customers, having a secure grasp on data is key. As Van Oosten explains, data can provide a number of benefits, from enabling personalisation and ‘frequently bought together’ features for customers, to implementing more sophisticated planning.

“With data, we can perform more sophisticated demand capacity planning,” he comments. “When we’re buying garden furniture, which might be for next season, usually there is a 10 to 14-month lead time on that. But how do we know today what next summer will be weather-wise? Is there going to be a demand for rattan furniture or wooden furniture? Is there going to be a specific shape or colour that will be a favourite for customers? That requires the ability to use random forest analysis approaches, which build on those very fundamental pieces of data and allow you to become more and more sophisticated.”

A solid understanding of data also enables Kingfisher to more efficiently manage inventory, as Van Oosten explains.

“When you are looking at inventory in the stores, perhaps you sell most of it, or you had a good buy,” he explains. “Do you mark that inventory down, or do you bring it back into your warehouses and save it for next year? Those decisions require a good understanding of data, and machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to help you to have a good approach around markdowns and promotions.

“If you have 300 stores, as B&Q does, and you have 35,000 SKUs and you sell for over 300 days a year, you do the mathsa spreadsheet and a human brain cannot cope with this. You need to be supported and enhanced by data and the internet.”

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 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.