Do & Co’s Digital Transformation Journey with MeRLIN: A Success Story

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:06][music] >> The Don Co Germany Holding is part [music] of the international Don Co brand operating in various sections of the hospitality industry such [music] as airline catering, international event catering, lounges, restaurants, and hotels.

[00:00:25]And in Germany alone, we're situated in more than 50 venues with over 1,000 employees catering such prestige venues like the Allianz Arena in Munich, the Olympic Park, and the SAP Garden.

[00:00:37][music] >> [music] >> When I took over the role of head of strategic procurement about 4 years ago with a team of six strategic buyers and spend over more than 60 million a year.

[00:00:54]As our venues are not only operationally very demanding, but have high visibility, we have to work with hundreds of suppliers [music] to meet our demands.

[00:01:09]The role of the [music] procurement team at Don Co is absolutely critical. We ensure legal and contractual security due to increasing regulatory requirements.

[00:01:20]Also, we focus on long-term planning with our suppliers not only to maximize value contribution, but also to meet just-in-time [music] delivery.

[00:01:36]The biggest challenge was definitely [music] the data quality due to a organically grown system landscape. We were [music] faced with the challenge that the master data was inconsistent.

[00:01:50]Documents and data was archived manually and by [music] spreadsheet solutions.

[00:02:01]We decided for Merlin because of three main reasons. First of all, the flexibility of the system.

[00:02:08]We had the the chance to get our processes [music] into the system, not the other way around. Second of all, the flexibility of the team, which was great throughout the whole process. And third of all, the cost-benefit ratio was just convincing.

[00:02:29]First of all, we did an analysis to define the gaps and create solutions within our needs, followed by a phased approach to upload all the existing data into the Merlin system and create an interface with our team. We defined an onboarding processes for the existing and new suppliers and created a reliable category management. By now, Merlin is our single source of truth [music] within our system landscape.

[00:03:02]>> [music] >> Master data is much more reliable and consistent by now with Merlin feeding downstream systems. Also, the collaboration with suppliers is much better by now.

[00:03:14]The departments and units within our holding have much quicker and better access to reliable data.

[00:03:29]Working with [music] the Merlin team was great from the beginning.

[00:03:32]Not only did they help a lot with the preparation [music] and the implementation, but also they helped a lot going through the whole process of change management.

[00:03:47]We will replace as many spreadsheet solutions and manual processes as possible.

[00:03:52]Right now, we are implementing the investment approval process, which will make everything much more transparent and sustainable. After that, we will implement the tender and audit modules, which are already part of the [music] Merlin system.

[00:04:14]>> [music] >> Merlin has proven extremely valuable in a complex environment like ours. It was very demanding journey, but a very successful one.