Every year, Germany’s EHI Retail Institute presents awards for outstanding use of technology in retail. At a ceremony during the EuroCIS 2025 trade fair, it honored the winners of its 18th Retail Technology (reta) Awards. Among them was German fashion chain Ernsting’s family, whose omnichannel pricing solution enables it to maintain consistent prices across all customer touchpoints and to manage promotions in real time. The company’s pricing concept—designed by SAP, CAS, and consenso—is central to its omnichannel strategy.
Plenty of people have started a business in their garage. Few have chosen the laundry room of their parents’ clothing and home textiles store. But that is exactly what Kurt Ernsting did in 1967 when he set up minipreis, a low-price fashion shop that would later become a household name throughout Germany. Today, with its award-winning online presence and some 1,925 stores in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, Ernsting’s family—as the fashion chain is now known—is one of western Europe’s largest omnichannel clothing retailers.
Cloud-based pricing process
“Because we aim to create seamless shopping experiences for our customers, we’ve already been following an omnichannel strategy for a while,” explains Hans-Jörg Blaeser, director of Technology & IT Services at Ernsting’s family. “This is why ensuring uniform pricing across all sales channels was the next logical step for us—not least because we were redesigning our online shop and needed a new pricing engine and campaign management tool anyway,” adds Dennis Reßmann, head of Software Engineering at the company.
The fashion retailer opted for a cloud-based omnichannel pricing solution. “The cloud architecture allows you to manage price queries centrally across all channels, use intelligent mechanisms to fine-tune price promotions, and integrate new stores and touchpoints with ease,” says Patrick Pierron from implementation partner CAS.
Two components, one award-winning solution
The solution at Ernsting’s family consists of two main components. One is the omnichannel pricing solution itself. This is based on SAP Omnichannel Promotion Pricing, which helps ensure consistent and uniform pricing across all customer touchpoints, such as online shops, brick-and-mortar stores, and customer and “endless shelf” apps, even when Internet connectivity breaks down.
“We operate a dense network of stores, so we are far from immune to this modern-day reality,” says Nils Böhmer, senior IT coordinator for Sales at Ernsting’s family. Lines can be damaged during construction work, routers can fail, and LTE coverage can be patchy, so there are a number of compelling reasons for having offline capabilities. Ernsting’s family therefore uses local PPS (promotion pricing service) boxes, which are offline derivatives of the cloud solution. “These PPS boxes synchronize regularly with the cloud-based omnichannel pricing solution,” Pierron says. “This means that stores always have the latest prices and can process sales even when the Internet is down.”
The second component of the new omnichannel pricing solution is a reduction tool. Based on consenso’s price engine, this tool manages price reductions dynamically according to local conditions, sales figures, and inventories—right down to individual store level. According to Philipp Borgmann, senior team lead for IT Merchandising, and Marcel Ruholl, managing partner at consenso, “This pays off in two ways. First, the system-driven price proposals have a positive effect on the balance sheet. And second, fewer stock transfers mean a lower carbon footprint.”
Seamless interaction
Another benefit of the Ernsting’s family solution is the way it seamlessly integrates the reduction tool, SAP Omnichannel Promotion Pricing, and SAP ERP. Price reductions calculated in the tool are automatically transferred to the central SAP system and distributed in real time to all the stores and to the online shop through SAP Omnichannel Promotion Pricing. “This is the best possible foundation for dynamic, error-free, and hyper-personalized pricing in real time,” says Philip Konitzer, head of Industry Division Retail in SAP Customer Services & Delivery Germany. During the project, he and his team were on hand to answer questions about the functions and performance of the SAP components.
Key elements of success
Despite being highly complex, the new omnichannel pricing solution went live quickly and without incident. The implementation partners who worked on the project attribute this largely to the company’s transparent and effective approach to change management. “All the stakeholders—from operational and strategic teams to management—were fully on board from the get-go,” Pierron recalls. This made it possible to define all the relevant requirements during the preliminary study, compare them with the capabilities in the SAP products, and identify the necessary adjustments at an early stage. Some of these were co-innovated with SAP and incorporated into the standard SAP Omnichannel Promotion Pricing solution; others were developed exclusively for Ernsting’s family in SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
“The way the project participants interacted was exemplary,” says Ernsting’s family project lead Mark Dinkhoff, head of IT Projects. And the proof is there for all to see: the solution is stable and running smoothly in both the online shop and at the company’s more than 1,900 stores in Germany and Austria. As part of its international expansion strategy, Ernsting’s family opened six new stores in the Netherlands at the end of last year. The roll-out went smoothly there too, confirming that the company’s award-winning omnichannel pricing solution is not only technically robust, but suited to international markets as well. This is great motivation for Ernsting’s family to push ahead with its expansion plans.
