Lindström Group
Constructing an ecommerce vision to support long-term business strategy
2 min read
Lindström Group
Lindström Group is a textile rental service company in Europe and in Asia, offering a wide variability of services ranging from workwear, mats, restaurants and hotel textiles to industrial wipers, cleanroom and washroom services.
WebsiteLindström Group identified a need to revamp its ecommerce strategy. They needed help exploring the alternatives for future ecommerce directions and help defining what the role of ecommerce would be for them. At the same time, Lindström was in the midst of forming a new long-term organisational strategic business plan.
Key objectives
Constructing and clarifying a new enhanced ecommerce strategy required taking user experience, organisation, and enterprise architecture into account. Hence, together with Lindström, we decided to combine the structuring of the long-term strategy and the ecommerce concept to follow consolidated business goals.
We started with an objective of defining an ecommerce vision and strategy. We did not only achieve that goal but were presented with three alternative concepts that were tied to our long-term business strategy. Columbia Road helped us to open our eyes, to see where we stand, what kind of options we have, and what to do in order to get there! The culture of a company is the sum of the behaviours of all its people
Erkka Lilja, Head of Process Digitalisation, Lindström Group
Our approach
We started by collecting information and viewpoints from different areas across the organisation. Combining internal views with intelligence on ecommerce trends and insights into the market competition enabled us to formulate a comprehensive vision for alternative options. Based on the identified challenges and opportunities, we identified three alternative directions for ecommerce strategy approaches. Each approach offered unique value propositions, expected values and challenges.
We illustrated each strategy concept from a customer journey angle by focusing on how each concept would be experienced by a target segment customer. Demonstrating concepts from a customer journey angle allowed us to clearly portray each concept's required internal capabilities in terms of architecture, technology landscape, organisation and processes. We defined the impacted areas in Lindström’s IT system architecture that each of these concepts would affect – including business logic, operations and accounting systems.
A concept that offered a middle ground in terms of complexity and risk was chosen for further examination. The development opportunities that were omitted from the chosen concept were formulated into development phases that are valid and implementable further down the road when the time is right.
Impact
The in-depth ecommerce strategy plan we presented based on the chosen concept, and its interactive prototype, was acknowledged to be a concrete and powerful means to fuel the ecommerce transformation and elevate business. The whole project team agreed on the choices and understood their reasoning.
Highlights
- Three alternative ecommerce strategy directions to envision possibilities
- Recommendations for digital sales organisation structure
- Roles and responsibilities in the new organisation structure
- Required capabilities to reach the chosen ecommerce strategy
- High-level roadmap to incorporate the ecommerce strategy concepts into Lindström’s long-term strategy
We made a meaningful impact by finding a new direction and concrete steps to implement a renewed ecommerce strategy for Lindström. We broadened Lindström’s vision whilst giving them concrete tools to go further.
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