Roland Köhler, Founder of advarics
Please take us through the inspiring story of advarics GmbH.
advarics was founded with a vision to simplify retail operations for the benefit of retailers and consumers. As consumer shopping habits evolved, moving fluidly between physical stores, online platforms, and mobile apps, the retail sector faced challenges in offering seamless omnichannel experiences. Recognizing this, advarics pioneered device-agnostic ERP solutions tailored to unify inventory management and POS systems across all platforms.
Over 16 years ago, advarics began offering its software products as SaaS-based cloud solutions, effectively moving away from the technical limitations of legacy on-premise solutions. Advarics was rapidly establishing itself as a pioneer in Europe's lifestyle retail sector, renowned for its innovative approach. With the latest evolution as a progressive web application (PWA), advarics has eliminated the need for installations and updates, offering unparalleled flexibility. Today, advarics continues to innovate, breaking down barriers between online and offline retail to provide its clients with solutions that work anywhere, anytime.
Could you give a brief overview of the company and its primary focus in the industry?
advarics specializes in providing innovative merchandise/ERP and POS software for the lifestyle retail sector. Its primary focus is to create device-agnostic, cloud-native solutions that unify inventory management, POS, and customer engagement across physical and online sales channels. By addressing the complexities of modern retail, advarics enables businesses to streamline operations, reduce costs, and offer seamless consumer experiences. Specializing in merchandise management solutions, advarics covers a broad spectrum of operations—from orchestrating purchase orders and managing inventory to facilitating stock transfers between stores and warehouses. The company’s robust checkout software solutions are another testament to its adaptability. Seamlessly integrated with major e-commerce platforms like Shopify and Magento, these solutions leverage real-time APIs within its purpose-built enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for the retail sector.
Could you perhaps elaborate on the services that your company offers?
At the heart of its offerings is merchandise management, enabling retailers to track inventory, manage orders, and maintain product data in real-time. This ensures that businesses always have the most up-to-date stock and product information at their fingertips, fostering more informed and efficient decision-making.
advarics also delivers innovative Point of Sale (POS) systems designed to operate both online and offline. These POS solutions are device-agnostic, enabling seamless transactions across various platforms. The offline functionality ensures that retailers can continue their sales operations without interruptions, even in the absence of an internet connection.
To further support retailers, advarics offers advanced interface management through robust APIs. These APIs allow for smooth integration with third-party systems, such as e-commerce platforms, customer loyalty programs, and personnel planning tools. This integration capability creates a unified ecosystem, enhancing efficiency and operational cohesion.
By leveraging advarics' solutions, retailers can significantly reduce hardware costs—by up to 80%—while gaining access to real-time data across devices. These offerings empower businesses to streamline their operations, enhance customer experiences, and adapt to the fast-evolving retail landscape.
What are the biggest challenges advarics GmbH has faced in bringing innovation into its service delivery?
It is always a challenge to find the right talent to competently implement these new technologies or your own new ideas. And new markets come along quite often with local legal and fiscal regulations that must be covered at market entry.
What new advances does advarics GmbH offer to digitally transform the retail sector that its competitors don’t?
At the beginning of 2025, we are launching a new way for brick-and-mortar retailers to generate e-commerce sales without the need for their own web shop or a connection to marketplaces, etc. The consumer's smartphone, tablet or email inbox becomes the retailer's direct and immediate e-shop. And advarics is able to support the entire payment funnel for every sales channel with an embedded payment solution.
How has advarics GmbH embraced innovation in its services?
advarics was developed based on an innovative concept back in late 2008 and was cutting edge in terms of technology and business model. As a rule, we strive to evolve from “within” rather than being led by “outside trends”. The tight collaboration with our close to 900 customers across different geos clearly provides ample inspiration and opportunity for this.
Being an innovator yourself, how do you foster a culture of innovation?
As a person, you either have the urge to develop and leave the “comfort zone of the known”, or you don't. Without this type of personality trait, there is no real innovation in a company, only maximum progress. You have to intentionally look for this type of talent or mindset and then you have to ‘fan the flames’.
Innovation always has something to do with the unknown, the uncertain, the arduous, that results out of a willingness to take a risk. That is why a good risk and error management culture is crucially important in a company.
A team should also ensure a healthy balance between employees who push new ideas and employees who view new ideas with skepticism. Innovation only prevails if it serves people and represents an overall gain. Innovation just for the sake of innovation is worthless.
What trends do you see in the industry in the next decade? What future plans do you have for your company?
In the medium term, software will play an increasingly active role in the interaction between technology and users. This means that software will increasingly no longer be operated by the user, but software will control the user and take over. The first innovative step in this direction was the widespread establishment of AI. The increasing integration of AI into broad areas of life is now the evolutionary next step.
Do you have any piece of advice for future innovators and entrepreneurs? How can they adopt innovation to achieve excellence?
Be curious and think your ideas “out of the box”. And never lose sight of the desired outcome: how does this benefit the people or companies that should benefit from your idea? This needs to be clearly defined and become your mission statement.
Your website emphasizes collaboration and seamless integration within your ecosystem. Can you explain how this approach benefits your partners and supports successful implementations?
advarics feels passionately about best of breed point solution that offer smart technology to businesses of any size – not just the big guys. We are the specialists when it comes to merchandise management and POS, but we are not specialists in other areas. We still want retailers to be able to have access to best of breed solutions also in other areas of their business. That’s why we are keen to collaborate with other solutions in retail tech. We want to fit perfectly into the IT infrastructure of a small to medium size fashion and lifestyle retailer.
When you speak to, you know, retail clients, what are some of the prevailing challenges that they face? And how is your solution at the forefront of solving those challenges?
Where do I start. The retail industry has been exceptionally dynamic and demanding for the last years. Post pandemic there were challenges around supply chains, the global economy experiencing tough times and now it is all about changing consumer behaviors, consumer loyalty and obviously the changing of ecommerce technology by AI shopping agents. Retailers need to be exceptionally agile to respond to all of these developments. And with that it means there has never been a better time to really make technology work for you and your business.
Can you share a specific case study where you helped a client overcome key challenges and achieve their goals — ideally with a clear before-and-after comparison?
We recently migrated a customer with 240 stores across three countries in 110 days. We are talking about a retailer with 150 years history and tradition. Very complex and unique processes across headquarters, stores and warehouses. It was a lot of work to map and document these processes but we did it. Moreover, it took us only 4.5 days to also migrate all of their existing (more than 240) POS. No business disruption at any point, no queues at the tills. That is remarkable and I haven’t seen that in my 27 years in retail before. This customer now has a modern, future proof retail ERP and POS system that equips their business to perfectly continue to grow and scale from here.
