Who is OTTO?
OTTO is one of the most successful e-commerce companies in Europe and Germany’s largest online retailer for furniture and home furnishing products.
The company is based in Hamburg and operates in more than twenty countries across Europe, North and South America, and Asia.
The Challenge
OTTO is undergoing a fundamental transformation of its business model into a platform: OTTO’s offering is increasingly opening up to business partners—perhaps the most significant shift for OTTO since its move to e-commerce. As part of a new central strategy program, they implemented end-to-end processes and created organisational structures that provided maximum support for the new business model.
OTTO needed a platform to help manage such a program in its complexity and track efficiency targets. Many individual improvement actions, and the associated large number of teams that work with the tool, placed high demands on the tool itself—which meant that relevant information had to be made available quickly and clearly, both at a team level and to top management. OTTO, therefore, needed a tool like Scientrix to monitor and track the implementation of a central strategy program.
The Solution
OTTO implemented the Deloitte Transformation Platform (DTP), powered by Scientrix.
The DTP allowed OTTO to continuously track improvement actions and actual versus expected financial benefits, allowed different teams to work toward a common program vision and allowed for simplified reporting so that teams could focus their efforts on the core tasks of the program.
Why Scientrix?
OTTO chose our software for our adaptability, lean interfaces, individual dashboards and our focus on core functionalities. We tailored our approach to address all their specified business needs, ensured that the tool truly supported the strategy program’s execution and provided continuous support throughout implementation.
Scientrix enabled OTTO with:
- A central overview of the overall program progress and status with aggregated KPIs and customisable analytics.
- An overview of reported implementation risks across the program.
- The ability to monitor each measure with individualised dashboards and status information.
Determining Key Objectives
OTTO had three main challenges and subsequent objectives for implementing our platform.
Firstly, their program’s complexity, the extended duration, and the need for continuous KPI tracking.
Secondly, improvement action implementation by many different yet highly interdependent teams required coordination and monitoring.
And lastly, heavy reporting requirements would take focus away from the execution of core tasks, so they needed a simple and tailored reporting system. By implementing Scientrix’s software, OTTO could easily address all three concerns within a simple governance model.
Managing Dependencies
One of OTTO’s main obstacles was that dependencies among >200 improvement actions drove program complexity. Scientrix’s dependency functionality addressed this challenge and helped to provide overarching transparency on all existing dependencies across the program—one of their favourite features.
Integration With Jira
Jira and Confluence were the entrenched tools for the detailed management of OTTO’s IT environment. The challenge was to let the IT teams continue using their preferred toolset for their day-to-day work while providing executives with status and progress visibility on program level without having to input information twice.
Using our preferred integration software (make.com), we could provide a seamless integration between Scientrix and Jira to ensure teams could continue using the familiar Jira tools whilst executives were kept up to date. And all this while OTTO was migrating from Jira Server to Jira Cloud.