About Top Bakkers
Top Bakkers is a Dutch network of artisan bakers. With a national network of around 65 regional bakeries, ranging from artisan to large-scale bakeries, Top Bakkers supplies fresh bread across the Netherlands. The company’s mission is to find and select the right bakers, and then manage all aspects of the ordering and delivery process, from purchasing to invoicing. This requires flawless handling of complex purchasing and sales transactions between numerous parties.
Top Bakkers’ request
Top Bakkers wanted to create a new ordering environment that would improve business processes and IT systems for both themselves and their clients. The goal was for clients to connect seamlessly to the entire process of ordering, delivery and invoicing, with the solution tailored to their specific way of working. Up until that point, Top Bakkers had primarily developed individual solutions per client, resulting in a greater maintenance burden and an increased risk of errors.
Our approach
Understanding Top Bakkers’ needs
In our first meeting, we worked intensively with Top Bakkers to understand their needs and vision. The concept we outlined during that meeting still forms the core of their new architecture. We also quickly realised that structuring and standardising the IT requirements of clients is essential, without adding unnecessary complexity. It is important that a solution is capable of serving hundreds of other clients with similar needs.
Top Bakkers also specifically expressed the wish to make the ordering environment both generic and flexible. This allows each new client with similar information needs to connect seamlessly to the same methodology. This fits within their vision for the near future, in which all standards and specifications of information needs will be ready within their system.
Joint implementation with GEM
In the past, Peppol Expert focused mainly on consultancy and did not have its own technological solutions. We repeatedly ran into the limitations of available technical solutions and eventually decided to take matters into our own hands. That is exactly what we did with our self-designed low-code platform, GEM — in which we can easily digitalise business processes. But how?
We like to explain it in our own straightforward way. Conceptually, you can compare it to a huge box of LEGO bricks in different colours and sizes. That box represents our internal product: all the process components. You then use different LEGO bricks to build a specific shape, such as a service (for example, a function in your ordering environment). We want to reuse that shape as often as possible. Occasionally we adjust it with a different brick from the same box. This allows us to fullfil hundreds of client needs, because the adjustment is already in place and is not complicated. We connect it just once, and then monitor all those LEGO bricks from a single location. This allows us to immediately see whether everything is working as intended technically. And perhaps most importantly, we can also check whether the business process is running smoothly.
Thanks to our monitoring system, we can quickly identify, for example, that no orders have been placed at time X, when normally they should have been. We investigate where things went wrong, resolve it and learn from it. This enables Top Bakkers to proactively fine-tune their automation. We understand how crucial their primary process is and anticipate accordingly.
Involvement and partnership
Through periodic evaluation sessions with Top Bakkers, Peppol Expert ensures continuous improvement, responding to feedback and new insights. This allows us to guarantee that the platform keeps aligning more closely with Top Bakkers’ wishes and business processes.
We also remain closely involved as a technology partner, because the digital world — and Top Bakkers as a business — is constantly evolving. Through strategic sessions, we explore new opportunities together and align the platform with changing needs. This ensures that our solution continues to add lasting value, now and in the future.
Results and experiences of Top Bakkers
Thanks to a solid foundation, Top Bakkers can now support its clients more proactively. Furthermore, one solution makes it possible to help many other clients, delivering significant time and cost savings while minimising unnecessary maintenance. Through continuous monitoring, we can quickly identify deviations, resolve them and learn from them, enabling Top Bakkers to proactively improve their automation. Peppol Expert understands the importance of the primary process and anticipates accordingly.
The close collaboration with Peppol Expert gives Top Bakkers peace of mind and comfort. This gives them the confidence that Peppol Expert is always on hand to provide support and service. The ultimate goal is to establish a seamless process between Top Bakkers and its clients. The collaboration with Peppol Expert is highly valued, in part thanks to a shared language and careful mutual communication. Top Bakkers therefore gladly makes use of Peppol Experts expertise and systems to strengthen their client relationships.
The strength of Peppol Expert lies in simplifying things that initially seem complicated. We then strive for the standardisation of all business processes, so that we can build generic architectures that are still flexible enough to respond to individual client requirements. For us, no one is just a client — we strive to be a true partner you can rely on.
