How Bleckmann scaled its customer base with a self-service customer portal

Bleckmann is the leading logistics partner for established names in the fashion and lifestyle industry. They are known for their industry-specific knowledge and work for major brands that move thousands of products across the globe every day. Next to these large brands, Bleckmann saw an opportunity to broaden its customer base by extending its logistics engine to support smaller players with big ambitions.

However, the process and software of Bleckmann were not able to address the needs of these smaller organizations. These types of organizations often lack the software to facilitate the logistics processes.

Together with Cegeka, they tackled these challenges by creating a self-service customer portal with a ready-to-use integration with Shopify. In this article we explain how we shoulder to shoulder delivered a solution within six months from day zero to production.

Building a platform for the next generation of fashion  

Bleckmann partnered with Cegeka to develop Bscale, a self-service platform tailored specifically to the needs of smaller fashion companies. The idea was to create a digital entry point that lowers the barrier to working with Bleckmann, while maintaining the same level of operational quality that larger customers depend on.

With a multifunctional agile team of developers, analysts, and a project manager, we developed a platform where small fashion houses could onboard themselves, manage orders, track logistics, and submit service requests.

A customer portal with back-office application

The functional requirements were analyzed in collaboration with a product owner from Bleckmann. After this analysis, we looked at the technical requirements, which led to the choice of OutSystems due to its low-code capabilities. Low-code development allowed us to rapidly build and iterate on the platform.

The platform integrates with Shopify, one of the most widely used e-commerce platforms in fashion. Products could be imported in just a few clicks, orders synced in real time, and logistics managed through a direct connection to Bleckmann’s warehouse management system.

Bleckmann’s own teams have an admin module, giving them the tools to manage client requests, monitor activity, and step in where needed.

Cegeka enabled Bleckmann's digital transformation

By partnering with Cegeka, Bleckmann successfully developed a self-service platform that helps smaller fashion brands to manage their logistics needs. With a collaborative approach we designed and developed a custom application meeting Bleckmann's specific needs.

“The Bscale application was the very first one we realized on our ODC tenant (Outsystems Developer Cloud). The Cegeka team of analysts, developers, project management and management team supported us in every phase of the project, with a wealth of expertise and know-how. The promise to realize this application at high speed on the chosen platform with various working integrations to other components of our application landscape was fulfilled 100%. Even after go-live, the quality of the work delivered was evident: hardly any topics to delve into during the hypercare phase, and an absolute minimum number of incidents afterwards. We look back on a pleasant and successful collaboration between Bleckmann and Cegeka in bringing this customer-facing application to life on ODC ”

- Dirk Hofkens, IT Project Manager at Bleckmann 

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