inco Cash & Carry.

The launch of a B2B retail self-scan app.

Inco Cash & Carry is one of Denmark's largest food wholesalers, selling food and accessories to companies from three department stores in the country.

Since 2019, Kruso has been inco's innovation partner in digital transformation and can here unveil the product of the first execution project: A native self-service app solution that will optimize the customer experience for inco's customers.

September 2022

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Organizing a digital innovation unit

Inco has streamlined their organization to handle exactly and only what are the core areas of the business: Purchasing and sales. Therefore, there had to be creative thinking in relation to the organization of the people who were to lead and drive inco's digital transformation. The suitable model was to create an autonomous digital innovation unit led by a digital product owner from inco's sales organization and an agile facilitator from Kruso. The unit's loose, staff-like link to the business, with only the most necessary dependencies and integrations to the rest of the organization, combined with the native business insight, meant that the project management could take place efficiently.

The simple connection between inco's and Kruso's organizations has also contributed to the collaboration being a close and natural knowledge sharing between, on the one hand, business insight through key people in the various business units that internally represent inco's value chain and on the other hand design and technology expertise.

CX pre study: Hype thesis-driven exploration of possibilities

During 2020, we conducted a study of inco's business to identify opportunities for digital business transformation. The study sought to test, validate, refine, and supplement several hypotheses about current and future challenges and opportunities linked to different ways of digitizing inco's core business.

The study methodology included stakeholder workshops, interviews, prototyping, user tests, data mining and technical analysis. The concrete outputs of the study were:

Business goals and KPIs
Customer Experience (CX)-produktvision
Graphic identity / UI language
Technical vision – Microservice architecture
Road Map for transformations/initiatives

Based on the study, inco and Kruso worked together to prepare a long-term, strategic digital change and investment plan, a Road Map. It resulted in the first project execution.

Agile development and execution towards an MVP product launch of the self-scan app

Where the initial study had a holistic, overall focus, the first execution project has been narrowly defined – with a very concrete and practical goal:

To develop a native app solution allowing inco's customers to serve themselves in the warehouses directly from their smartphone.

We started from the comprehensive product backlog that emerged from the CX studio. Through a 2-week sprint model, we further specified, enriched, designed, tested and built (and tested) the final solutions, so it was ready for the releasement.

The combination of solutions constitutes inco's first customer-oriented self-scan app. The app can be accessed through the Apple App Store and Google Playstore.

Quality assurance through user-driven design methods

But how do you ensure that the execution of such a project has the customers in focus? Rooted in a user-centric approach, we started by asking, "who are the users and what needs and prerequisites do they possess?" These aspects allowed us to quality assure the product continuously, focusing on inco's customers.

And who would be better to help us than the people who have daily contact and interaction with the customers?

Through a flexible and agile participatory design approach, we involved not only the key people internally in the organization but several layers of inco's business; everything from technology experts to sales, marketing, customer service and cashiers. Equipped with the prototype, inco's employees were the first to do a user test. With a broad representation across customer touchpoints, we gained valuable insights into the users' prerequisites and needs and how the product could support the employees' daily work, interaction and dialogue with customers.

User tests were collected, analyzed, processed, and finally implemented through a series of microprint; testing, design customization, testing, design customization...

A big step into a new data-driven era

Inco has, with the launch of the app solution, taken a quantum leap towards a fully integrated digital business model that meets the customer needs for intelligent and personalized services delivered seamlessly across a wide range of channels.

Futurewise, there will be a focus on operationalizing data and insights from customer journeys. These areas will be the most important business drivers for further digitalization.