Supply Chain as a Growth Engine

How Can Supply Chain Drive Rapid Revenue Growth? At the invitation of Involvation, growth champions Rituals and Assa Abloy shared their perspectives on this question during the Involvation event “Supply Chain as a Growth Engine.” Rituals has laid the foundation for its future with a new data platform, while Assa Abloy has shifted its focus from cost to service. “We will never strive for a single ERP system. That would only slow down our growth.”

Growth Through M&A

Assa Abloy pursues an growth strategy of 10 percent per year: five percent through organic growth and five percent through acquisitions. “However, the market doesn’t allow us to grow as fast as we want. That’s why we’re doubling down on acquisitions to compensate for the lack of organic growth. At the moment, we’re acquiring one and a half to two companies every month,” explains Danny van der Ster, Vice President and Head of Logistics at the global manufacturer of doors, locks, and alarm systems.

After each acquisition, Van der Ster’s team follows the same procedure, beginning with a network study to determine the logistical center of gravity. “We usually acquire local companies, whose supply chains we then transform into international ones. That can mean sourcing certain components from the Czech Republic or China,” Van der Ster explains. “But we don’t change everything. For example, we leave their ERP system intact, which means we now have 37 different ERP systems. We will never replace those with one integrated ERP system — that would only slow down our growth strategy.”

Supply Chain as a Growth Engine

Involvation invited Van der Ster to share how Assa Abloy uses its supply chain as a true engine for growth. Host Jeroen Scheepers, Partner at Involvation, opened the event by explaining what this requires. First and foremost, it demands an end-to-end supply chain strategy that is fully aligned with the business strategy. “Integrated Business Planning is the cross-functional process where all key decisions are made — from operational to tactical level,” Scheepers said.

Upstream, it’s vital to build a resilient supply chain that can cope with uncertainty in demand and supply. “Downstream, towards customers, it’s about adopting a fully customer-centric approach — one that ensures the supply chain executes the right actions for the right customers,” Scheepers continued. “Finally, several enablers are essential: digital planning capabilities and talent development.”

Refocusing on the Customer

Assa Abloy enlisted Involvation’s help to refocus on customers — something that had become necessary after years of acquisitions. “More acquisitions mean more customers, more products, and more complexity. We were too internally focused, too busy improving efficiency and reducing costs,” Van der Ster admitted. “Data analysis showed that we were failing on no less than 22 percent of customer order lines. And we were performing even worse for our A-customers. That realization was an eye-opener.”

“A ‘one size fits all’ strategy simply didn’t work, so we began segmenting and defining different service levels per segment.”

Action was required. Since a uniform strategy wasn’t working, Assa Abloy started segmenting its customers and defining distinct service levels per segment. Internal collaboration improved, especially alignment with sales. The processing of small-customer orders was automated, freeing up time for the largest customers. Van der Ster adds: “We also adjusted our planning strategy and paid extra attention to master data, such as lead times and minimum order quantities. Getting those right is crucial to keeping promises to customers.”

The Core: Business Technology as a True Partner

Like Assa Abloy, Rituals also pursues an ambitious growth strategy — but with a focus purely on organic growth. Successfully so, as Kai Jacobse, Director of Business Technology at Rituals, explains: “In the six years I’ve been with the company, revenue has grown from €500 million to €2 billion. In the next five years, we aim to double that again to €4 billion,” he says. “We now have 1,300 own stores worldwide, and we open about 250 new ones every year.”

Where many organizations still see IT as a support function, Rituals has organized its technology around the business. In the Business Technology Operating Model, three layers can be distinguished.

At the center are the Business Alignment Teams — the pivotal layer that directly connects with operations, understands end-to-end processes, and translates business needs into concrete technological solutions. Below that sits the Core Capabilities layer, responsible for actual IT development. The Governance & Control layer ensures consistency, quality, and cohesion across the organization.

According to Jacobse, the success formula of the Business Alignment Teams has three pillars:

1. They act as internal consultants, actively co-creating smarter, more scalable, and customer-centric processes.

2. They maintain an end-to-end focus across the full value chain, aligned with Porter’s value chain.

3. They operate with a clear, up-to-date, and connected roadmap of projects, priorities, and dependencies — ensuring that technological development remains purposeful rather than fragmented.

A Concrete Example: From Hard-Coded to Scalable

At the same event, Involvation consultant Allard Bontes offered a glimpse into a concrete project that embodies this philosophy: the renewal of the data model in Rituals’ supply chain. The old model had been designed for a single distribution center and a handful of stores — and was full of hard-coded rules. For a company now operating 1,300 stores worldwide, that model had become a major bottleneck.

A completely new data model was built around parameterization — capturing values and rules as adjustable parameters. This model now forms the foundation of a hub-and-spoke IT architecture, where all data are stored centrally in the cloud and linked to the systems that use them. The result: one single source of truth and truly scalable growth.

The Lesson: Vision Makes Technology Relevant

The power of Rituals’ approach doesn’t lie in one specific model or system, but in its underlying vision: technology only creates value if it remains relevant to the business. The risk of rapid growth is that you may develop a lot that eventually loses relevance. That’s why it’s vital to continually steer based on business value. As Bontes summarized it:

“One of the reasons Rituals is so successful is its vision on IT. They understand that investing in technology is crucial to grow to €4 billion — and they’re willing to make that investment.”

With that vision, Rituals demonstrates that successful growth isn’t just about new stores and products, but about a well-designed organization — one where business and technology strengthen each other instead of merely chasing one another.