Körber, a global provider of end-to-end supply chain execution solutions, recently briefed the analyst team at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions about their rebranding, customer milestones, and unified technology platform vision. Körber has taken significant steps to ramp up its unified platform vision and rebrand itself from a house of 12 brands to one branded house for meeting the current and future market requirements. The company’s rebranding strategy aims to strengthen its position as a global leader in the supply chain market by emphasizing its unified technology capabilities eliminating existing brand confusion and a single go-to-market strategy approach, addressing the underlying complexity of synergies and ultimately gaining high brand visibility.
The company demonstrated its supply chain execution convergence strategy under its Körber One technology platform. Körber One is a unified platform that leverages innovation from around the IT ecosystem to provide the basis for an end-to-end suite of supply chain execution applications and integration capabilities for its fixed and flexible warehouse automation solutions including Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR). Körber plans to accelerate the journey towards its convergence vision by leveraging and investing in innovative technologies, such as microservices, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), Low Code Development tools, and cloud-centric technology offerings.
With the Körber One initiative, the company has laid out a robust technology roadmap that focuses on various strategic areas: the ML and AI-enhanced technology platform itself; a rich suite of supply chain applications including a standardized portfolio of WMS offerings; and add-ons that allow customers to extend solution capabilities as needed. It provides customers the capabilities and flexibility to adapt and grow their supply chain solution as the business evolves.
The Körber One Platform initiative is built around the consolidated technology platform. It is cloud-native with a microservices architecture and delivers a range of enabling technical capabilities, such as a common data model, low-code development tools, and FlexPages, a UX platform for the development of an intuitive, consistent UI to facilitate training and onboarding of users. Körber has also defined a well-targeted plan on various other aspects of the technology platform, including a services platform and a business process and integration platform. Enhanced with these capabilities, the Körber One platform will enable the portfolio of Körber’s rich supply chain applications and provide the next generation of an integrated supply chain execution solution.
The company is looking at offering a modern, cloud-centric technology solution to provide long-term agility and unparallel adaptability, supporting customers’ current and future market requirements.
Körber’s portfolio of warehouse management applications is well recognized for offering a greater level of adaptability to suit industry-specific and organization-specific requirements. The company is further making significant enhancements to provide the next generation of business agility with its low-code development capabilities. With low-code tools and cloud-native applications, organizations gain the power of DevOps without requiring coding know-how. With highly configurable applications along with the power of low-code development tools, customers flexibly adapt functionality and can significantly accelerate their time-to-value without the need to migrate or undergo complex development and implementation processes.
Körber has successfully catered to some interesting use cases during the pandemic post its rebranding strategy. Despite the global pandemic, Körber could maintain its growth momentum with strong revenue across its supply chain solution portfolio. The company presented several interesting customer case studies demonstrating how a variety of global customers leveraged Körber’s end-to-end supply chain solutions to address their unique challenges.
One of the leading global FMCG firms was facing challenges during the Covid-19 pandemic – with an increase in overall volume along with complexities related to a variety of products and their SKUs at multiple warehouses and requirements of less-than-full pallet deliveries. The company has successfully addressed challenges with the deployment of Körber’s K.Handle Layer Picker solution. As a result, the company also got new deals from the same company to cover two additional warehouse sites facing similar challenges. The company also presented case examples from Boot Barn, Arizona Beverages, and the dm-drogerie market, amongst a few others. The primary reasons for these successful adoptions are attributed to its integrated WMS, WCS, and AMR solutions, breadth of product portfolio, a strong customer brand equity, and adaptability to meet customer’s unique requirements.
Quadrant Knowledge Solutions recognizes Körber’s unified technology platform vision implementation strategy, compelling product roadmap, and rebranding strategy as a major milestone in offering the next generation of supply chain solutions. With its next-generation cloud-based technology platform focusing on innovations to provide enhanced visibility, improved planning, and stronger monitoring via Körber One, unique depth of technology and expertise in spanning software, automation, mobility, robotics, and material handling equipment, investments around advanced technologies will further improve its brand visibility and help the company to deliver a better customer ownership experience.
About the Co-Authors:
Shruti Jadhav is an Associate Research Director at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions. She is responsible for planning, managing, and conducting global strategic market outlook, market insights, technology guide, SPARK Matrix analysis, and user consulting assignments. Shruti’s research focus areas include retail and supply chain management, customer experience, digital commerce, marketing technology, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and such others.
Shruti is also a part of a user and vendor consulting group that focuses on delivering various consulting projects, including technology architecture planning, vendor/technology selection strategies, operational due diligence, and custom market intelligence. As part of the global Megatrends and industry convergence analysis, Shruti is tracking the impact of advanced analytics, AI, ML, and automation technologies on global technology developments and their overall market impact.
Akshaysingh is a part of Quadrant’s global research and consulting team. He is responsible for global Supply Chain Management and Retail research.
Akshaysingh is responsible for conducting global strategic market outlook, SPARK Matrix Analysis, and client consulting assignments. He has worked on strategic research and vendor evaluation projects for Omnichannel Order Management Systems (OMS), Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR), Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), Supply Chain Planning, Sales & Operation Planning (S&OP), Retail execution Platform, Retail forecasting and Replenishment, and various others. Akshay is also a part of Quadrant’s best practice team in identifying the most promising companies in the Supply Chain Management space. He is also part of the team for consulting assignments including detailed market mapping, custom market intelligence, analyst briefing, and others.
Akshay holds an MBA in Operation from Mumbai University, India, and a B-Tech in Computer Science from the University of Pune, India.
