Catawiki is the online auction platform for rare and harder-to-find objects. It was founded in 2008 as a community for collectors and in 2011 hosted its first auction. The auctions grew rapidly and led to Catawiki being named the fasted growing tech company in Europe in 2015.
Today they host weekly auctions in over 80 categories ranging from comic books to classic cars and from fossils to fashion, all curated by a team of in-house experts. Headquartered in the Netherlands, Catawiki has offices across Europe and a vast international team.
Challenges
In 2011, Catawiki began hosting weekly online auctions and quickly experienced unprecedented demand for its online auctioning platform. The subsequent rapid growth put its existing business model under strain as it transitioned from a start-up to an SME level organisation, and substantially increased its headcount to meet demand. Streamlining IT operations was paramount to onboarding new staff, whilst simultaneously keeping IT administration efforts to a minimum to support expansion, without overwhelming the IT department.
As self-professed lovers of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) app Workday, Catawiki needed a system that would complement its use of the application. It would need to run in tandem with the application to continue monitoring finance and expenses, without causing disruption to usual working processes. The ideal scenario would be that, as new employees were onboarded, its HR team could create an account that would then automatically provision accounts within the company’s network of corporate and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.
Read the full case study here