nJoy - The Hive

The Hive is a powerful product-lifecycle management tool, created from the ground up.

Background

DAI-TECH was founded in 2010 around the common purpose of doing something different and better than what the market had to offer. Under the nJoy brand, they develop consumer oriented IT products meant to be sold as standalone items on the shelves of retail chains. Currently, nJoy is present in 10 countries in Central Europe and the Balkans.

They employed us to deliver an ERP system, called The Hive, created from the ground up to fit their particular needs.

20% faster product
development
30% decrease in
man-hours
The Hive initially consisted of a product lifecycle management (PLM) module, which we delivered in late 2011. Work didn't stop there: in the past 13 years we added CRM, sales, logistics, forecast, service center and call center modules, fully digitizing nJoy's internal processes.

How we addressed nJoy's main business needs

We worked together with the nJoy management, IT and design teams to understand their workflow and translate this business logic into an easy to use and scalable system. This system would act as a collaboration hub between nJoy, it's suppliers, service centers and distributors.

Product management was unreliable
Problem

Before The Hive was built, nJoy relied on multiple software and spreadsheets to manage their products. This process was unnecessarily time-consuming and error-prone.

Solution

We created a tailor-made product lifecycle management tool, which allows nJoy to manage the most important steps in the lifespan of their products, from development and manufacturing, to distribution and logistics.

Automatic control points, approval mechanisms and clear overviews regarding progress and responsibilities make tracking the status of a product a breeze.

nJoy - The Hive - Product management was unreliable
Communication with suppliers involved multiple channels
Problem

Prior to the development of The Hive, all communication with the suppliers was done by email or communication tools like Skype. This soon led to the creation of data silos and a lot of valuable information and feedback was lost.

Solution

Our solution was to integrate supplier communications into the software. Now, suppliers can actively collaborate, access information or comment on products. Since everything is structured in a single software, no more information is ever lost!

nJoy - The Hive - Communication with suppliers involved multiple channels
Planning, tracking and collaboration on projects was unstructured
Problem

There are lots of tasks to be done outside of product development as well. Soon, nJoy felt the need for a better system to track all the tasks and responsibilities of team members.

Solution

We created a task management module that seamlessly integrates with all the other modules.

Apart from the usual functions like reminders, notifications, priorities and assignees, each module can automatically generate tasks for a team member, or even an entire team based on pre-set rules and workflows.

nJoy - The Hive - Planning, tracking and collaboration on projects was unstructured
nJoy - The Hive Adorian Demeter testimonial Adorian DEMETER General Manager at nJoy

"I couldn't imagine how developing products would work without The Hive. Since its introduction, development of new products is 20% faster and all our data is organized and easy to manage."

Key takeaways

1
Plan for the future

We knew, that as the company and it's IT requirements will grow, so will the need that the system be able to handle the increasing amount of data and the quick development of new components.

A lot of thought went into designing a modular architecture that runs on dedicated servers, making it easily scalable.

2
Never underestimate data migration

Thanks to some thorough business requirements analysis, we quickly found out what nJoy's plans were with the software for the future. This meant that we knew that a lot of data will need to be migrated from pre-existing software.

Armed with this knowledge, we set out with a clear migration strategy from the get-go. We came up with a data strategy plan, a robust database architecture and a set of custom APIs to prevent data duplication and creating data silos.

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