Howdens transforms trade model with no code platform

A Howdens kitchen is a mark of aspiration for many homeowners, with the FTSE 100 company providing one in three kitchens in the UK.

The company operates on a trade-only business model, selling its kitchens and related products exclusively to professional tradespeople rather than directly to retail customers, ensuring they are fitted correctly to a high standard.

Central to this business model is its decentralised approach: Howdens operates a network of over 850 depots across the UK and Europe. These depots are strategically located to serve tradespeople locally, offering convenient access to products.

While this approach has turned the kitchen brand into a successful business – selling £2.3bn of kitchen-related products each year to a customer base of 555,000 – having a completely decentralised business does provide challenges for any tech roll-out, as its chief customer officer, David Sturdee, notes.

“When you are running a decentralised depot model you need to empower people to drive the model forward at a local level but also to be able to have control and centralised governance,” he told TechInformed.

What’s particularly challenging for Howdens is that many of its depots are managed in different ways, using a plethora of different reporting tools and spreadsheets. One objective this year has been to launch a single CRM solution flexible enough to for customisation with the ability to accommodate different user groups within its process.

For Sturdee, the approach from the start needed to be about cocreation: because, he adds, “the more the depots cocreate the more they buy into it.”

Enterprise CRM model “broken”

When Howdens began reviewing legacy enterprise CRM tools on the market, Sturdee claims that both cost-wise and flexibility-wise most of these systems wouldn’t work for Howden’s business model.

“We’ve got to the stage now where we’ve grown our sales by 7% (CAGR) and yet the costs charged by enterprise software players were going up 17% over the same period,” he said.

“At some stage, the magic of technology has been lost and we have this institutionalised software approach that has outlived its usefulness for us. So, we went into the market to see what else was there,” he added.

The kitchen brand’s journey brought it to Creatio, a ten-year-old, no code platform vendor founded by Boston-based Ukrainian expat Katherine Kostereva.

The cloud based platform (supported by AWS and Azure) automates workflows and builds applications for marketing, sales and services – meaning that it goes head-to-head with technology behemoths such as Salesforce and Microsoft, although it argues, it is able to help business customers build applications at a much faster rate.

Giving the pitch, Creatio’s chief sales office for Europe, Darren Lewis says: “We’re built on a modern platform, not old technology so when it comes to moving quickly or being agile, we are highly customisable.

“It’s hard to configure when you’ve got a platform that’s been meshed with 25 to 50 integrations that all must talk to each other and having tools on the outside to make it all work.

“Creatio is just one platform, a single database, so imagine how much quicker you can move when it comes to deployment cycles, customisation or changes – there are no restrictions.”

To trial whether this platform would work for its depots, Howdens asked Creatio to build a pilot version of the software in 12 weeks, engaging with an initial user group of 20 depots.

While the initial pilot went well, the challenge grew as they began to scale further – into 120 depots, as Martin Mercer, Howden’s director of user experience, noted.

“We continued to add features and functionality at the request of these depots. As each cohort was onboarded, we saw training requirements and the adoption curve steepen dramatically,” he said.

“The people involved in the initial pilot helped shape the features and develop the solution – learning each new feature as it was onboarded and developed. But by the time we’d reached 130 depots it was significantly more complex than the one we’d initially launched,” he added.

Redesigning information architecture

According to Mercer, the kitchen brand’s aim was to be able to roll the platform out, at pace, to the rest of its depots in a way that made it intuitive, from day one, “so that staff were able to use it to do their work, without feeling overwhelmed.”

The solution, he adds, was to redesign the architecture. “We started by conducting a workshop where we identified three key users of our systems: depot managers, sales designers and business developers.

“We then broke down each of the tasks they had to do into a ‘to do’ list which contained info that they needed to know to get more value from customer leads.

“We then built filters for more advanced users to get further value out of data held within the platform.”

The result of this is that navigation of the platform has been simplified from eight items to just three that are focussed on core specific job roles in these depots. Tasks that are a priority and time-sensitive are positioned at the top. These vary depending on job roles. It could be a sales forecast, the size of a lead bank for depot managers, or info on kitchen joinery for designers.

An advanced tab enables competent users to create their own folders and filters so that they can extract even more value from the database.

“Using traditional developer techniques this would have taken us months to change but utilising the flexibility of the Creatio platform meant we were able to make these changes in just three weeks,” Mercer adds.

The UX director attributes the success of the project to the understanding of the customer needs.

“A lot of people design systems and software but don’t think about the people who are using it. Or just think about one or two user groups. The real unlock here is, whatever you build first time, no matter how good the UX is, it won’t be right for everyone.”

And Sturdee, a former chief operating officer and customer officer at Yum! Brands, adds there’s no better way of bringing employees on a digital transformation journey than by making them feel part of it.

“I know from talking to people in the depot that in the pilot phase we were 80% of the way there in just 10 weeks – they were like “the platform is good but not built for me” – it was that last two weeks that the team really spent refining the UX – that last 20%  – which meant that everyone became fully immersed because they were part of that journey.

“Tech is an enabler but unless you pull the people with you to drive that success you are not going to realise that investment,” he adds.

As the Kitchen firm rolls out the tech across all 857 depots,  Sturdee confirms that it will be easy for users to make further tweaks along the way – because there’s no code involved. “Howdens changed the architecture from eight stages to just three in two weeks. That’s three to four months of development work if you are using traditional platforms.

“If a businessperson wants to go in and make a further change to a guided stage, they can just click a drop-down menu and make that change or add to it. No IT integrations are needed.”

GenAI

Howdens has also embraced GenAI this year, with an app released for its core user base aimed at providing practical advice to tradespeople to make their jobs easier. Chip uses Microsoft’s (GenAI) technologies, including Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure AI Search and Applied AI Services.

According to Sturdee, Chip marks only the start of Howdens’ AI journey as the firm continues to explore other ways AI can improve efficiencies for its customers. Given that a major part of Howdens’ business is kitchen design, Howdens can’t ignore the opportunity to use GenAI in the design process– although Sturdee makes it clear that the technology will be used to support and not replace designers.

“With GenAI right now we’re looking at the ‘Where?’ and the ‘How?’ Clearly there’s going to be a role it must play in the design process. But it will be around augmenting and helping the designers in the business be more efficient and helping them with the way they do their job, rather than being a replacement,” he says.