It was 2007 when Rudolf Ring decided to really get going. The ambitious eBay seller as a side job was to become a professional and serious store operator for lamps and lights. Rudolf, known to us only as Rudi, made the right decision. Today, click-licht.de is one of the most innovative and successful online stores this industry has to offer. We will show you how this impressive development has taken place.
The question of ERP is at the beginning.
Right at the start of his online store click-licht.de, there were the first challenges to overcome: “I had developed my store on the basis of xt:Commerce and was now looking for a suitable ERP system. During my web research, I came across a small but excellent freeware ERP from the brothers Janusch and Thomas Lisson.”
JTL software had not even been founded at that time. The ERP was still called “eazysales” and was a useful and welcome addition, especially for many xt:Commerce users. “This ERP was the only one capable of communicating reliably – albeit not perfectly – with xt:Commerce and exchanging the relevant data! These properties were enormously important for me and my plans!”
Lamps you can touch and test.
The fact that the decision to use JTL-Wawi was the right one became very clear just two years later. Rudi Ring now wanted to open a store in Recklinghausen to offer customers a better service on site. “The customer can look at and test the lamps and luminaires in person, which enhances the buying experience and makes the purchase decision much easier. This is particularly important for lamps.”
The further developed JTL-Wawi was able to provide him with optimal support at this point. JTL-Software-GmbH, which had been founded in the meantime, had gained a partner in the software company Luwosoft, which had developed its own POS software for JTL-Wawi with LS-POS®. The new store was thus integrated into the overall click-licht.de project on the software side. The new workflows were quickly internalized and the next hurdle towards professionalization was taken.
From xt:Commerce to JTL-Shop3.
The next big step towards becoming a JTL power user came when click-licht.de wanted to replace the now unsupported xt:Commerce shop system with the new, modern JTL-Shop3 at the beginning of 2012 as part of a major shop relaunch.
“If you’re setting up a completely new store that’s already running well, then you should go for a future-proof system,” Rudi told us. “And xt:Commerce was no longer being actively maintained at the time. It was very obvious for me to rely on the JTL-Shop system because this shop harmonizes 100% with the Wawi – and the JTL-Wawi was at the center of our activities.”
But Rudi Ring was not satisfied with the “off-the-shelf” store system. “I wanted more: additional functions and more performance. That’s why we installed JTL-Shop3 on a particularly fast managed server and made some technical modifications. These included improved access to the SQL database, which meant that static content that rarely changes had to be cached and not read out again and again”.
One of the first individual store enhancements was a customer gallery that allowed customers to upload a picture of their new lamp after purchase and present it to other interested parties. This store feature is still popular today and offers potential buyers additional impressions and ensures greater trust.
However, the impressive highlight is the so-called “Home Lighting Designer”. This is an Application that allows store visitors to view the lamps in action in their browser by day and night. “Being able to see the lamp in a room in the dark is a real added value for the customer. If I am correctly informed, we are the first application in Germany to use this new technology from Philips,” Rudi continues.
The bottleneck: effective warehouse management.
However, the continuous growth of click-licht.de also presented the company with new challenges time and again. As early as 2010, the store’s small warehouse no longer met the requirements and was replaced by a larger warehouse with 400 square meters. “But the larger the warehouse became, the more difficult it was to handle shipping, because there was no shipping solution. An isolated solution programmed by a third-party provider only took care of the inbound posting of goods into the warehouse; picking and packing was done completely manually. We had to remember where the goods were, and sometimes different box colors helped us not to lose track completely.
The passionate light retailer was all the happier when JTL Software presented its own warehouse management system, JTL-WMS. Tailored precisely to the processes of the mail order business and an ideal fit for JTL-Wawi. “We were one of the first to test the new JTL-WMS warehouse management system. Thomas and Janusch Lisson knew about our problems in the warehouse and wanted our practical experience to be incorporated into further product development. Our daily workflows were a model for the processes in this warehouse management software. My first impression was: “That’s awesome!
The warehouse management system integrates seamlessly into the JTL ERP system and supports its users in all processes within their warehouse. Goods receipt, goods issue, order preparation, pick list creation, inventory and adjustment postings – the JTL-WMS optimizes warehouse processes and makes them much more transparent and clearer. It is important that both systems work on the same database and that every action is visible in both systems in real time.
JTL-WMS: Mobile solutions and fast shipping.
At click-licht.de, many problems have disappeared into thin air with the new warehouse management system from JTL-Software. “We had a solution before, but with JTL-WMS we have a 100% improvement and from a single source,” Rudi reports. “In the morning, our three warehouse employees start their tablet PCs (2 iPad mini and 1 Samsung Galaxy Tab 3) and load a pick list for 10 sales orders at the same time, for example. Then all the items on the list are collected on a trolley, with JTL-WMS dictating the optimized route through the warehouse, shelf number and shelf location to the employees. In the subsequent packing process, the items are then divided by sales order and packed into the individual cartons”.
The advantages of JTL-WMS for click-licht.de are obvious: “Faster commissioning, easy handling during packing and avoidance of packing errors,” Rudi reports to us. “The increase in performance in the warehouse is enormous: “My people no longer spend 10 minutes searching, but less than 1 minute.
In a short video that we made together with click-licht.de a few months ago, you can see the benefits of this shipping management system in practice:
“The qualities of the warehouse management system have become clear ever since we put the new 900 m² state-of-the-art warehouse from click-licht.de into operation,” enthuses Rudi. For him, the optimized interaction of warehouse, warehouse management and ERP is one of the most important factors for the success of his company.
International markets are attractive.
But Rudi Ring is still a long way from reaching his goal with click-licht.de. Now that ERP, store system and warehouse management are working together as one, he is setting himself new goals. He now wants to use his recipe for success to penetrate the European market. “We already deliver throughout the EU and to Switzerland, but now we want to launch our own specifically optimized country stores. That’s no problem with JTL-Wawi, JTL-Shop3 and JTL-WMS,” he says confidently. “Good and beautiful lamps are not only in demand in Germany …!”.
You can see for yourself just how right he is here:
Lamps & luminaires online store – click-licht.de
We wish Rudi every success in his next steps and look forward to continuing our great collaboration.
