CD-Invest - BI, AI, IBM i

Home  /  Case studies  /  Deknudt Frames

Ten metres of shelf. Eight thousand products.

Deknudt's retailers could stock a few hundred items. The other 7,500 were invisible to shoppers — and that was a sale lost for both of them.

A wall hung with many different picture frames
ClientDeknudt Frames — founded 1923
PlatformIBM i on IBM Power System S814
BuiltWhite-label e-commerce for retail partners
ResultFull range reachable through every partner site

The shelf-space problem

Deknudt Frames manufactures more than 8,000 products — frames, wall decorations, photo albums, gadgets — and sells through a network of dedicated stores across Europe.

A reseller of our products who has ten meters of shelf space can have approximately 300 to 500 items stocked in store, which is only a small sample of what we offer. To remedy this, we decided to launch an e-commerce platform that our dedicated resellers could present as a seamless, fully branded element on their own websites.

Bruno DeknudtCEO, Deknudt Frames

Most of those resellers are small or midsize businesses with little capacity to build e-commerce of their own. A central white-label service also meant a new product range had to be entered once and cascaded everywhere, instead of every partner duplicating the work.

Why it had to be on the IBM i

The commerce is the easy part. The difficulty is that each partner gets specific ranges at specific prices with specific discounts and delivery agreements — complex business rules built up over decades on the core systems.

Our product catalogue is very large and our database also contains specific, complex business rules associated with product pricing, promotions, and codes. These govern which products to display on our resellers' sites, and which combinations of options are feasible. These rules were originally built on IBM i — we felt that no other platform would be able to execute them as efficiently and effectively.

Bruno DeknudtCEO, Deknudt Frames

So we built the platform on the machine that holds the rules, using open-source web components — including Ghostscript and ImageMagick — running natively on IBM i on the existing Power System S814, alongside the core systems. Integrated at database level, a change to the product mix flows to every partner site immediately, with no synchronisation step to go wrong.

Partners personalise almost everything: look and feel to match their own site, and the precise mix of products they offer. They can even grant discounts through a redemption-code system, effectively passing part of their commission to the shopper.

What it changed

  • Retailers stock the popular items and order anything else on demand, delivered direct to the shopper
  • Items whose minimum pack size made them impractical for small retailers are now sellable
  • Measurable improvement in payment processing and inventory tracking, with instant stock and delivery information
  • Orders confirmed, invoiced and passed to the logistics partner with human intervention largely removed
  • Lower administrative cost and lower total cost of ownership

This up-to-date, open source solution runs side-by-side and fully integrated with trusted core business systems originally coded in the 1970s. In all the years we've used IBM i and the Power Systems platform, we've never experienced any issues around stability or security.

Bruno DeknudtCEO, Deknudt Frames

Deknudt started computerising on an IBM System/32 in the late 1970s and pioneered handheld devices for product data in the late 1980s. You can draw a straight line from that System/32 to today's Power S814 — and the code from the 1970s is still doing its job underneath a modern storefront.

Source: cdinvest.eu portfolio, Deknudt Frames (2017 · Deerlijk, Belgium). All quotations as published.

Previous caseID Logistics Next casePrint & Frame