Top Bakkers is a nationwide trading company that connects nearly fifty artisan, regionally focused bakeries with major B2B customers, such as hotel chains, retailers and healthcare organizations. From the outside, the setup is straightforward: customers have a single point of contact, receive one invoice and place their orders through one platform.

Behind that simplicity, however, lies considerable operational complexity, with tens of thousands of small transactions every day, each with its own pricing agreements and delivery terms. The only way to make this work was to build a solution around Top Bakkers’ business logic. Today, the entire commercial process runs on the Thinkwise Platform, from order to invoice.

For years, Top Bakkers worked with a financial software package that did its job, until the organization outgrew it. Assortment management was largely manual, price lists and product data were spread across different locations, and as the network of bakeries grew, maintaining consistency became increasingly difficult.

A standard ERP package seemed like the obvious next step, but proved to be a poor fit. Large ERP systems impose requirements on product data, such as standardized product codes, fixed category structures and uniform input fields, which artisan bakeries simply cannot meet. In addition, many of these packages charge per transaction, while Top Bakkers handles large volumes of small orders with small margins. The new platform needed to process data from the different systems used by the affiliated bakeries and convert it into a single, uniform standard. A standard ERP solution would have required extensive additional customization and would not have aligned sufficiently with Top Bakkers’ specific business logic.