I've been working in the field of CX for seven years now and was also involved in the Radeberger project mentioned earlier. So I think I have quite a good understanding of Emarsys and I'm delighted to be able to share a little bit about this here today. - We'll now do a very short segment on "Douglas and Emarsys." First, a very brief marketing segment: Who is Douglas? I think everyone is familiar with us. If not, please feel free to speak up. It's just to provide a complete picture. But it also helps illustrate what we'll be showing in the next 20 slides, which is that we're the leading omnichannel provider in Europe and want to continue growing in this area. This has been our primary goal for the past two and a half years. We have just under 2,000 stores. We're present in 22 countries, and two years ago, we started... I'll just quickly skip ahead to these figures... just so that we can see them and that they are shown, for the sake of completeness. Then, two and a half years ago, we started thinking about how we could expand our omnichannel strategy while also unifying and standardizing our IT landscape a bit. Then, following SAP's acquisition of Emarsys and with SMC due to be discontinued, we started thinking about what we would do once SMC was discontinued. We thought it would be a good idea to switch to Emarsys and consolidate at the same time. There's also a consolidation project in other SAP technology areas, like Commerce Cloud and the EC, which we used previously. And then we just kind of saw that as the icing on the cake. If these systems already exist, then Emarsys was the obvious next step. We then looked at various options, but quickly settled on Emarsys because it integrates very well into our landscape – into Douglas' SAP Commerce Cloud, into the SAP CDC – Customer Data Cloud. We were also very confident that it would deliver improved performance compared to other systems we had, including SMC. We use it to manage nearly 86 million contacts. We have major campaigns in different countries, in some cases very big countries with 30 million contacts, such as Germany and France. We wanted to manage these using one system. Emarsys covers all the channels we use, especially email and SMS, push, and also print. Because in many countries, and especially in Germany, a lot of business is still done using print. And we also saw that it is a suitably mature product and that there is a partner network in place. That brings us back to Adesso, because we were already working with Adesso. They also provided support when we introduced SMC. And because they had the necessary expertise, we'd be able to switch from SMC to Emarsys with Adesso's support. And so we've come together again for this project. We had a number of goals that we needed to achieve as part of this project, which was quite large. On the one hand, there were the IT goals. We had to replace SMC in eight countries. We also had a number of other marketing systems, such as Adobe Campaign, Triveo, and EchoMail, in other countries. Here, the decision was taken from higher up that if we were going to introduce Emarsys, we would do it properly this time – unlike with SMC, where we stopped half way. Instead, we'd roll out Emarsys in all countries. This kind of ties in with the third point here: unification of the IT landscape and standardization. This meant we could also benefit if a country proposed something that could be used for all countries. We have this omnichannel focus that's been increasingly pushed forward over the past two and a half years, since the new board took over. We really want to offer customers an experience: from the store to mobile, to the app, to push notifications and back again – and we've seen that this works really well with Emarsys. And we wanted to have a unified solution for all markets. We didn't want countries to work with different tools, because that also doesn't align with our strategy. It's important to know that Douglas has a centralized organizational structure. The key departments are all based in Düsseldorf, including Central IT, Global CRM, Global Marketing. But each country has its own headquarters, which then manages the country's teams. In other words, we have the strategic divisions in Düsseldorf, where this decision was also made and the project management was based. But the marketing teams are based in the countries, and they're the ones who run the campaigns. This is also just to help you understand that we involve the countries. So we don't do everything from Düsseldorf, but rather in collaboration with the countries. That's why here we have the "Business Project Goals." The Global Marketing department in particular wanted to have a standardized template that also incorporated a standardized CI so that we could set up unified campaigns. The Valentine's Day campaigns are a good example of this; they are set up centrally, made available to the countries, and then each country can essentially use the assets. And that's much easier now with Emarsys, because everyone only needs one information set. Then they only have to provide the country information and do the translation, but the whole CI and design part can be delivered centrally. We've placed a greater focus on cross-channel communication with Emarsys. We were also using a variety of other tools, such as Airship for push notifications, where we said if we use a tool like Emarsys, we can replace this whole landscape of additional satellite tools with it. This was also part of the project. We said, okay, everything has to... we'll try to bring everything under one umbrella, do everything with Emarsys in future. We had our own in-house printing solutions that had been in use at Douglas for about 15 years, and here too, we said this would be easier with Emarsys. We introduced the wallet. Together with Global Marketing, we also designed a toolkit with different modules. In total, there are around 50 modules that anyone can use. Some of them are pre-filled, so the marketer just has to drag the module into the newsletter and everything is ready. They are pre-translated for all languages, but they can also be customized. That was also the whole point, to increase the speed at which the marketing departments can work and to establish a consistent CI. In April of this year, we began introducing a new loyalty program, Loyalty 2.0. It was rolled out in Holland first and has now been rolled out in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The press also reported on it a little. The strategy here involves a very high degree of personalization. And again, we said: Okay, it's essential that we have a tool that allows us to focus on this. And once again, that was Emarsys, because it delivers everything we need in terms of functionality. The last part was more of an internal goal for us. We want to make sure that an internal Emarsys user group like this encourages countries to exchange ideas and that Emarsys is actually used. If one country discovers something that works well, the other 19 countries should also adopt it so that there is a synergistic effect. Then here we have a bit of general information about our project setup, which is where Adesso comes into play a bit more again. We set up a project, assigned various lead roles, including the lead roles for tech and production, or "Delivery" as we called it, which we outsourced to Adesso. We also brought Adesso on board as a key project partner, essentially handing it over to a partner and filling very few roles internally at Douglas. So only four or five, and the rest of the team actually came exclusively from Adesso. And we really only had points of contact at our company, myself as the project lead and another point of contact for the countries, because the countries are managed globally. The corporate headquarters takes care of that, but Adesso handled everything else. We had a tight schedule because we said we wanted the rollout to happen within 18 months and we still had six months to prepare. So we started two years ago, then began rolling out in March 2024 and now we're basically on track to finish with the 13th country in September. We're currently completing the final steps. And the only way to do this was to work in parallel. We couldn't do it one country at a time; instead, we had to work on multiple countries at the same time, which meant that we sometimes we had to fill roles at Adesso twice or even three times and then had sub-teams that actually handled two or three countries simultaneously. We started with a pilot project, that was in Austria. Then came Switzerland and Germany, which were the largest. After that, we started the rollout and began working in parallel. We also had other teams at Douglas who did the groundwork for back-end development and data. We used Snowflake as our reporting solution. And we faced another challenge, which is probably common when working in multiple countries in succession. Which is that there are already some countries using Emarsys productively in their operations. At the same time, we're still rolling it out to other countries. And at Douglas, we solved this by integrating the product ownership for the existing Emarsys product into the project team, and with both of us taking on this role. This meant that any enhancements to the product while the project was still ongoing were automatically implemented on our end. It meant that we didn't have to coordinate anything, but that key features were rolled out for everyone in turn. Basically, that the Emarsys product at Douglas was always available to everyone – because we also added various things here and there – and that there was no need to coordinate anything. We've been doing this together for the past two years. It's slowing down a bit at the moment because the rollout is over, so we're separating things again. We worked in close collaboration with SAP and Emarsys, sometimes weekly, other times more frequently. We benefited greatly from this, especially during the initial phase, because it was the first time we had done this for so many countries at the same time. And we had the support, which was really good. We also always coordinated very closely with our internal strategic departments and the countries involved in the implementation. We also held kick-off meetings and training sessions on site, which meant traveling to all the countries in Europe, and Adesso handled most of that. But we also visited some beautiful countries. We went to Madrid this year, and we went to France. Now I think it would be good if you could do the Adesso part. – Absolutely. Essentially, this is a visual representation of the entire project setup. As Boris mentioned, we created a kind of leadership level, a core team at the top, which takes a bit of a lead role in the country rollouts. In other words, Boris acting as the project lead, then from Douglas' side, various business leads who are responsible for specific country clusters, and a CLC campaigns lead. CLC stands for customer lifecycle. This is an important topic at Douglas, namely automation, personalization, automated campaigns that run smoothly – this entire strategy can be introduced and mapped with Emarsys. And then on the other side the technical lead, which is my role, and the delivery lead, which is sort of a project management role on the Adesso side. We all worked very closely together and in close communication. And then underneath that we had the technical team from Adesso and a campaigning team, from which certain people were then always selected to form a country team, so to speak, which then carried out the country rollout. In other words, the technical team was obviously responsible for the technical aspects: the basic Emarsys setup, configuring everything in Emarsys itself, helping with integration, and overseeing the rollout process. And then there's the campaigning team from Adesso's side, which Kim already mentioned. As a major IT service provider, Adesso naturally also offers consulting services for campaigns, including campaign strategy, but we also have people for content, for UX, for UI. Some of you may be familiar with the abbreviation A11Y. That's the wonderful "German Accessibility Improvement Act." Obviously we also had to factor that in, so we enlisted experts from Adesso to help with this too, as and when appropriate. Of course, the fact that Adesso is a major IT service provider and as such, has experts in all kinds of different fields was a huge advantage here. From a technical point of view, we were also able to call on additional experts. Because we don't just use SAP products and have these integrated in Emarsys, but we also use Snowflake and, of course the Google Cloud platform, for example, which is also relevant to Emarsys. So, here too, we were always able to call on experts. But essentially, that's the core team. And on the left are the Douglas countries. So, people from the Adesso teams then formed groups that were responsible for a particular country. Since we rolled out multiple countries at the same time, it wasn't possible to do this sequentially. Instead, we needed to create specific country teams who would then communicate with the country in question, with the local marketing teams, set up the campaigns, go through all the translations with them, and provide support throughout the process. And accordingly, the business leads, who are then the point of contact for the countries, from the headquarters side, from Douglas. That's basically how we set the whole thing up. Right. I'll take it from here. Now we'll get a bit more into the details. This is more just as an example, or rather to show what we've been doing. It's definitely not comprehensive. This is obviously also partly due to the fact that these are insights about Douglas that we don't necessarily want to divulge. Of course we don't want to disclose our entire campaign strategy, but just to provide a rough idea of what we've done. Douglas has, I would even say, a lot more than 25 customer lifecycle campaigns per country. A customer lifecycle campaign is usually a marketing automation, as you might imagine. On the right, you'll see an automation example. This is an example of a birthday campaign. It goes much further than that. It can be much bigger. This was the only one I could fit into a screenshot, that would fit here. In some cases, we created very, very large automations. Within these automations, this resulted in well over 50 customer communications. And that's across all the channels we've been using. Boris has already mentioned which specific channels these are. But we'll see them again in a moment on another slide, which provides a bit more of a visual illustration. And then there's the challenge of doing all this in in each country's language. So each country obviously has at least one national language, especially in Europe. But there are also countries like Belgium, where multiple languages are spoken, or Switzerland, where three languages are spoken. In other words, all of this had to be mapped out. Since setting up all these campaigns is obviously a lot of work, we provided support from Adesso's side with our campaigning team. The countries were briefed specifically on what they would have to translate, how everything should look, and how it would look in terms of where they could still change a few details. But essentially, Douglas Global provided the guidelines, and based on these, the Adesso campaign team then went in, set up the campaigns, and handed everything over to the countries in the review process so that each country could continue with its day-to-day operations and we could still achieve the rollout on schedule. Then I've also included an example on the subject of personalization. It doesn't cover everything, but it's just meant to briefly illustrate what we do. The example used here is an email. So on the one hand, we can of course differentiate based on the Beauty Card. Douglas has a loyalty program where customers can get different Beauty Cards with different levels. Based on that, you can personalize the whole design or just the header of an email, and use this to grab the customer's attention. The classic approach is to focus on the greeting, of course. I think that's one of the basics when it comes to personalization, which everyone does. Another important aspect is personalized coupons. At Douglas, you can request or display personalized coupons for specific campaigns or a specific target group. Here, "personalized" means that the coupon belongs to that particular customer and only that customer can redeem it. And, of course, this also provides a certain degree of tracking. In other words, if you know which coupon belongs to which customer and that this coupon was redeemed, then of course you also know where it came from and from which campaign the customer received the coupon, so you can track the entire process to a certain extent. But even here, Emarsys is not only responsible for displaying the coupon in the email, but also for ensuring that the coupon exists in the first place. In other words, when a customer logs into the online store, there's also a corresponding coupon center, and the coupons that are displayed there are also fetched from Emarsys. What we've created is a pretty technical, rather complex construct, but it works very well. Right. And it's just basically to illustrate that we would then of course personalize this across the various channels. Then there's the Beauty Points. At Douglas, customers can obviously collect points. I'm not sure if anyone is familiar with this. They can then redeem these points. I'm not exactly sure how many Beauty Points to a euro, but there's a conversion factor of some sort. And of course, customers always want to know how many Beauty Points they currently have and how many will expire at a certain date, so that they can redeem them. And we've also made it possible to personalize this. The next two blocks you see here are all recommendations. At this point, I have to mention that we don't use the Emarsys recommendation engine at Douglas. This is another external one. But thanks to the flexibility of Emarsys, we've made it possible to configure the whole thing for users, so that different personalization services or recommendation services can be used here. An example of this is brand affinity. Douglas categorizes its customers based on which brands they like, which other brands might be a good fit for them – in a way, similar brands, because of course they... I believe it's kind of emotional, especially when it comes to beauty products. Customers are attached to a certain brand and are then more inclined to buy that brand's products. And based on this, it's then possible to provide recommendations or suggest products that are a good fit for this brand, personalized for this customer. Below that, you'll see another personalization service. This one is behavior based, meaning it's based on the customer's behavior. What is the customer doing on the website? Which products are they looking at? Specifically, which product categories are they looking at? It is perfume? Is it makeup? Is it body care, or something like that? And then based on that, I can then of course personalize the whole thing. This can also be much more detailed. I can of course use this module in Emarsys to exclude certain brands, if I don't want them to be advertised. I can exclude certain categories. I can only display sale prices or only discounted products. I can only display non-discounted products. It's highly customizable. The little bubbles you see here on the right, this isn't illustrated here. It wouldn't fit anyway, but we've included it here as well. Basically, the concept of the top store. Douglas is still very much an offline business, at least in terms of its stores. As we know, there's a Douglas store in virtually every city center, and every customer generally has a preferred store that they visit most often, possibly because it's the closest. There are a number of different approaches and we can also personalize the email or content to include these stores. Along the lines of: "Why not visit your favorite store again?" And then include the address with a picture, the opening hours, etc. Everything is included. And then there's the loyalty tiers. This is also something Boris already mentioned. Douglas launched a new loyalty program. It's similar to how Miles and More or the Deutsche Bahn work in that you collect status points based on different activities you engage in. It doesn't necessarily have to be a purchase. It could also be something like rating Douglas, recommending Douglas somewhere. You collect different status points and that earns you a certain tier. And based on that, we can then also change the way the email is presented. This is known as block targeting, or it can even include completely different content. In other words, it might look a bit different for a premium customer than it does for a basic customer or just a prospective buyer who hasn't purchased anything yet. In combination with personalized coupons, this means that based on a customer's status, they may receive different benefits than someone who has never made a purchase. And all of this is managed in Emarsys. Then I'll move on to the tech setup. So, how does it all look? What data have we integrated and which channels do we use it for? Firstly, there's the basic contact information. The next slide provides a simplified representation of the architecture. As far as I know, the audience here is more business-oriented and less technical, so I'll keep it brief. Contact details are essential; we need these as a foundation in order to even have customers who we can address through various channels. Then DNA, which really stands for customer DNA. In other words, Douglas does a lot of analysis. What a customer's brand affinity is, which we've already discussed, but also more generally speaking, which categories the customer falls into and the potential for cross-selling to that customer. This involves a whole range of background algorithms and logic, and we also use all this data in Emarsys to segment customers and and personalize their experience. Then the Beauty Points, which we've also already seen as part of the email personalization. Then obviously the purchases, products, and stores. What this triple means, of course, is that a customer may have purchased certain products at a store. Online would be a purchase through the online store, but offline it would be in person at a physical store. And we've also integrated this data into Emarsys so that we can then use it to address customers. Or it can be in response to this. So it can also be event-driven after a purchase. Maybe the customer is asked to provide a rating, to score the experience. How did they like it? Then there's the classic back in stock, which is pretty customary. The customer selects products for which they would like to be notified when they are back in stock. This is handled by Emarsys. Abandoned carts, another very classic campaign. This is to encourage customers to complete their purchase. The coupon center, which we've already mentioned, is powered by Emarsys, or rather, the whole thing is managed through Emarsys. And Loyalty 2.0, that's a big one, Dougas' new loyalty program. Then on the side, we have the recommendation engine, which we already saw in the email. This is basically integrated into Emarsys from an external source in order to make specific recommendations. And the channels, as already mentioned, are email, SMS, the Douglas app, print, and mobile wallet. The mobile wallet is a relatively new channel that we're currently only testing in one country. But it works very well for sending push notifications to loyalty card holders or customers who have added their loyalty card to their wallet, and using this to encourage them to make a purchase. It can viewed as a bit of a supplementary channel to the app push, because customers who download a wallet or add their loyalty card to the wallet may not be the same customers who use the app. And that gives us an additional channel. And then there's the important aspect of print, which I think will decrease over time – save the planet. But it's definitely still an important factor, especially for the older generations at Douglas. They still expect a physical flyer that may include a coupon. And all of this is also handled by Emarsys. Then here we have a slightly more architectural representation of everything. It's a very simple representation, but I think it explains it well. Basically, Emarsys is in the middle. We have the CDC, or Customer Data Cloud, from which we retrieve the contact information, and it's all integrated via the standard connector. This is obviously also the advantage. It's also why Douglas decided to go with Emarsys, because they already use a number of other SAP products, like CDC or SAP Commerce. Then there's Snowflake, which we've used to integrate the whole concept of DNA, scoring, and AI algorithms that run in the background. You could also use an SAP Analytics Cloud here, but it just shows how flexible Emarsys is in this regard, in that it's possible to integrate all kinds of big data tools and import the data using the RDS feature. This provides a very flexible way of accessing data without requiring a great deal of technical effort, and allows you to integrate the data and then decide how you want to use that data in Emarsys. Effectively just accessing tables in Snowflake and then being able to generate specific segments there. On the other hand, there's also the return path from Emarsys. All the data that Emarsys generates, whether that's opens or clicks, the entire range of customer touchpoints – all this data is also published in Snowflake so that it can be used again and then imported back into Emarsys or made available for Emarsys to use again. At the bottom you can see the mobile app, which is integrated. I won't go into this in detail right now. And there's also an Emarsys integration layer. Douglas is essentially very microservice- oriented. In other words, it uses a large number of different microservices for different purposes, all of which generate data that needs to be integrated with Emarsys. And we've created a layer for this purpose, which is the Emarsys integration layer. This is a proprietary solution, simply because it suited the Douglas architecture and the Douglas landscape. It could also have been an SAP CI solution, or it could have been developed on the BTP. It's generally very flexible in terms of how you want to structure it all. That's it for the architecture. Now I'd like to hand over to Boris again to talk about the project successes. - That's right, the project successes. So, what have we been doing over the past two years? We started looking into Emarsys in mid-2023. We then set up the project team, as I mentioned earlier. We spent a long time planning and gathering requirements, not just from our global departments, but also from key countries to some extent. So, from the large countries that also have a certain degree of influence. And then, at the beginning of 2024, we rolled out our pilot project in Austria. That was in March/April. This was quickly followed by rollouts in Switzerland and Germany. This was done before high season, which starts in October. October, November, December is Douglas' strongest quarter in terms of sales. We always focus on this period in particular. It's when we generate a very large percentage of our sales. We also rolled out in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia at the same time, and we did that with Adesso as well. We also did this before the high season, meaning we had already rolled out in six countries in 2024. And then in early 2025, which was still during high season, we continued with the other larger countries: the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and most notably France. France was challenging because they weren't on SMC and also handled all the administration themselves. So in France, we're not known as Douglas, but as Nocibé. But it is 100% owned by us. And they then had to shift to the Group's strategy. They had brought along a whole host of other tools that they had built around their Adobe Campaign solutions. And we've gradually phased all of those out with Emarsys. And in the past few months, we've started rolling out in the Baltic region, Lithuania and Hungary, and Estonia and Latvia are in preparation, which means we have rolled out in seven countries this year. Our main goal was to replace SMC. On August 1st, we effectively achieved this and handed this back to SAP, because by then all countries that had been using SMC had already completed the process. That basically also took a year and a half. In the meantime, we also had a redesign at Douglas, which was something of a side project, because at the end of 2024, someone decided it would be a good idea to treat ourselves to a redesign of the website as well as all print and online media. But by this point, Adesso had already built a template for the Emarsys rollout, which was already up and running. So we asked Adesso for another team. They then said: Okay, we need to revise all these templates again, which we'll then incorporate into the next rollouts at the same time – that's how product ownership works – but we'll also roll back the tools that have already been rolled out. Adesso committed a lot of people to this project. And we agreed that it was necessary because the higher-ups wanted this redesign to be implemented in all the countries. At the same time, we also had to implement the German Accessibility Improvement Act, which came into force everywhere on June 30th. In other words, the template Adesso built was then also checked to ensure accessibility. It's a complete HTML template. In the past, we worked with images a lot in SMC, which no longer complies with the standard for how things should be done. And on all devices as well, on cell phones, on tablets, on laptops. At the same time, we also replaced Airship as our push messaging service. We were also using it in all countries. But not through SMC. We were also able to use Emarsys to manage this quite effectively, in combination with the app. We also standardized our SMS provider, because at Douglas, each country had its own provider. We decided to go with one that's also integrated into Emarsys as a standard solution. We would sign a contract with that provider and then all countries would use them. We did the same with the print solution. I've already spoken about that. It was developed in-house by Douglas. But it was really old. We replaced that too and said this would have to be done through Emarsys going forward. That way, there's a data pool that can also be used to run campaigns. Integrating Snowflake was very important to us. In both directions. That is, the reporting coming from Emarsys for all channels. That's the lower section, standardizing the reporting so we can compare: Do print campaigns work better than previous SMC campaigns, or even SMS or email push campaigns? All of this flows into a single data pool and is then compared. And the return channel, too. I can use Snowflake very effectively to create segments and then feed those back into Emarsys and then decide to test them there quickly. We do a lot of this using the A/B testing capability. That way, another department – not just the marketing department, but also an analytics department – can help create even more precise segmentation and test even more accurate models, including how to best appeal to customers based on their purchasing behavior, across all channels. - May I ask a question? - Yes, of course. - Coming back to the project successes, what was the biggest challenge or maybe the most interesting aspect, particularly in terms of the transition from SMC to Emarsys? - Well, for one thing, there was the relatively tight schedule. We were told it would be good if we could complete it in two years, by the end of Douglas' fiscal year, by the end of September. That would be two weeks from now. It would be great if we could manage that. And then we also faced a bit of resistance from the countries. They were all used to using their own tools. It wasn't just SMC, but each country had... - Different tools. - Different tools. And then there were different tools for different channels too. And that's been a bit of an adjustment process. It required a great deal of communication, because there are some very strong countries involved. Countries like the Netherlands, Germany, and France carry a lot of weight within the Group and they naturally want to have a say in matters. And to a certain extent, they do. But it's a global strategy that's managed from Düsseldorf. And I think that was the biggest challenge, not to steamroll the countries, but rather to get them on board and explain that we're doing this for them. And so far, we've really only heard good things. Everyone has said: "Yes, this is the better tool. It's much faster. It looks better. We can do a lot more. The data is more accurate." But that was kind of the biggest issue here. - Right. Then I'll take over again for the look ahead. In other words, where do we go from here? The project is not yet complete. We have replaced SMC in all countries, but there are still a few countries that use some smaller tools or other tools. The plan is to introduce Emarsys in these countries as well, in line with Douglas' strategy. This means a rollout in seven additional countries starting in 2026. So next year, we'll continue, adding many additional countries where Emarsys will be made available. We're also expanding with additional integrations, such as WebExtend. Currently, all web behavior data flows into Snowflake and gets used from there. But the plan is to use all of this directly in Emarsys as well. More for event-driven content, not so much for segmentation. Precisely. But other integrations as well. Of course, the company never tires of figuring out what else it needs and what additional information is relevant in order to properly address its customers. The same applies to additional channels. We're currently working on WhatsApp. Using WhatsApp as a communication channel is still relatively new for Emarsys. But this is definitely something we'll be focusing on in the near future. And of course, testing the AI features, obviously. We'll start by looking at what we can use, including ways to incorporate AI features from SAP as a whole. So not just the Subject Line Generator, but also looking into ways we can take the whole thing a step further. Because Douglas generates a lot of content, which requires a lot of input from staff, and AI can provide valuable support in this area. AI can also be a good option when it comes to translation. Then on the more strategic side: channel orchestration. A lot of content is delivered across all channels nowadays. We're already using orchestration to determine which one is best, but we want to focus on this even more so that we don't annoy customers and then end up losing them. And that's where the strategic groundwork is laid – it then feeds back into the campaigning team so that they in turn can work on the campaigns, continuously optimizing all customer lifecycle communication and consequently also incorporating the optimization and expansion of the personalization component. In other words, having more and more personalized data and personalized information available to use across all channels. Especially with regard to the Loyalty 2.0 program, which is the last point here. This is still being rolled out at Douglas. A lot of personalization and integration is taking place, particularly in this regard, but also in terms of introducing it to the other countries. Another aspect that we'll be tackling soon, or that we're currently working on, is the whole issue of transactional and service communication. At the moment, we're using Emarsys mainly for marketing communication, but we also plan to use it for transactional emails, whether that's order confirmations or shipping confirmations, and that's something we'll be focusing on going forward. That brings us to the learnings. And you'll wrap things up? - That's right. Of course, we also sat down with the Adesso team from time to time, sometimes at our offices in Düsseldorf, sometimes in Dortmund or Hamburg, and held retrospectives. We discussed what we could do better, what we learned from the project, and what we could do next. After all, it's going to take another year or two before we've rolled out to all countries. It's a change project with numerous participants, which kind of goes back to your question. A large company like this with 20,000 employees is going to have a lot of people in marketing who want to have a say, who should have a say, because marketing is really the most visible channel for customers. That has to be taken into account when setting up the project. The second point speaks to the importance of having a partner like Adesso, who has done this before and who came on board early on. It's also important to note that Adesso hasn't just provided support throughout this project, they're now part of our operations team. So Adesso essentially assigns people who continue to oversee the operations, even in countries where Adesso has already rolled out Emarsys. They had also done this before for SMC, but it's just incredibly helpful. For example, the automation that Marius showed earlier – there was a briefing from the country for that, but no one from Douglas was actually there to set it up. Adesso simply handled that drawing on their experience, because they know the marketing team and they know the campaigning data, so they made a suggestion. We then went over it again and said: "Okay, does this work for our business requirements?" But we were very happy that input from other projects could be incorporated, not just from within Douglas, but also from other previously completed projects. That's right. We set up a project team with our partner, which was definitely very important, and we also got the relevant key people from within the company to join the project team, and we had the support. That's my fifth point here: sponsors in IT and business who finance and prioritize the whole thing, who then also assign people to it. To be able to achieve this in two years, we have pretty much worked almost exclusively on this project in large chunks. We had a pretty good rollout plan and a training plan to get the countries on board. That's definitely also very important: involving the countries early on, training them, providing on-site training. When we started, we had a whole team at Adesso who just recorded video training sessions, including multilingual ones, which we made available to the countries ahead of time. So: What are we rolling out? What can you expect? This is Emarsys. We had a test environment where everyone could play around with it. We needed time for requirements management. Obviously, you can never have enough, but we made really good use of the six months we had, also with Adesso's support. We knew exactly what we were doing and didn't add too many new things. Of course, we had to incorporate the redesign, which came from the top, but we actually had a fairly good idea from the start of what we wanted to roll out in the end, and that's what we've achieved now. You can never have enough time and resources, especially resources. And yes, the last point, communicating with each other. That's particularly important. And in the end, just test. ... - Could you name one thing that you would definitely do differently today, looking back on the project, maybe something you'd share with those who are just starting out; and one thing that went really well, maybe even unexpectedly. If you had to choose. - I'll start with the thing that went well. Oh, I don't know if you also... - I had France as the unexpectedly very good thing... - Yes, that was going to be mine too. In France, we planned to roll out SAP's Customer Data Cloud and SAP Commerce, which didn't go particularly well because the French team is used to working very independently. We also expected more resistance to Emarsys, but that didn't happen at all. They were a little hesitant at first, just because they were used to their Adobe Campaign solution. But once they saw the first examples, things moved very quickly and they were like: "Oh, this thing can do so much more." So we were very surprised and we stayed on schedule. So that was actually the surprising part. Well, what we wouldn't do again... - I have one thing. We did a lot of remote training when we started, but I believe we then realized that this wasn't as effective at getting the countries on board as being there in person would be. Really providing the support, going out to dinner together, allowing for a bit more direct interaction. So we actually did some follow-up training, meaning that we went there in person. And I think that would definitely be something we would do right from the start next time. Other than that... - So what was the problem? That they were ignoring the issue or didn't understand it? Or... - Exactly. Obviously sitting in a meeting for a few hours where nobody knows whether I'm listening or not is different from being in a training session where you're really interacting with each other directly and doing exercises and so on. We just realized that we were getting more buy-in from the teams. They had a clear point of contact on site. They knew the person. They could chat about it over dinner in the evening. We understood the pain points a bit better and could address those. And we also learned about other issues here and there, and new requirements came up that we weren't aware of before, which only came up during the training sessions. We then quickly had to come up with solutions to these. I don't think that would have come up as much in a remote training session. That would be... - Was there any sort of business case prior to this project, such as a cost-benefit analysis over the two-year period? What did you want to achieve? What was the technical change and how would it benefit the business? - Yes, there was. That was part of the tender process. So, as I said, once it was clear that Emarsys was moving to SAP and then during the second phase, once it also became clear that SMC also had an end date, we naturally started to do the calculations. Then there was the omnichannel focus in terms of the strategy at the beginning of 2023. To say, what impact will that have? Also for IT, unification, standardization. Just in terms of the systems that we've deactivated alone, what we save in terms of costs, on system costs, on operating costs, on support costs in each of the countries and at headquarters. That's all been calculated. That was obvious, of course. In two years, that has to pay off. But it has. - When did the return on investment materialize? - It's too early to say. You would have to look at which calculations to use, because it also has an impact on the brand. Calculations have been made, but we'll see over the next year or two to what extent it has paid off, especially in terms of the large investment. ... I think the person behind you was first... - It's great that you got through it so quickly. With so little time... - Not through Emarsys at the moment. - I know you're using it, but how you want to use it. So... the best way to start. We're already starting with this project because it's super interesting, being able to access this data, and doing that through Emarsys. Or in CTP later on. What are the next steps? - We're still in the discovery phase. That means we've looked at several providers. Obviously, there are other providers out there if you don't want to use the Emarsys solution.