How Europe's leading e-bike retailer unified ERP and CRM for 400,000+ customers with Catalyst
The Partner
codafish is a Germany-based Zoho Premium Partner specializing in CRM strategy, ERP–CRM integrations, and scalable cloud solutions. With deep expertise across the Zoho ecosystem, codafish helps fast-growing businesses design future-ready digital architectures that scale effortlessly.
From complex franchise roll-outs to high-volume data synchronization projects, codafish is known for turning operational complexity into streamlined, automated systems.
Key Expertise:
- Zoho CRM strategy and enterprise rollouts
- ERP–CRM integrations
- Scalable, cloud-native architectures
Industry:
Retail / E-Mobility
Solution Category:
ERP–CRM Integration Platform
The challengeDisconnected systems, growing data, and operational friction
As e-motion, one of Europe's largest e-bike retailers scaled up their operations to over 1,000 employees, 95 stores, and more than 400,000 customers, their operational backbone began to strain.
Parallel systems and fragmented workflows slowed teams down
e-motion relied on velo.port ERP for merchandise, workshop, and inventory management, while Zoho CRM powered sales and service. With no native integration between the two, teams were forced to operate in parallel worlds.
Manual reconciliation at massive scale
Running both in parallel meant duplicate records, delayed updates, and inconsistent data that created confusion across franchise locations, sales teams, and service operations.
A high-risk CRM rollout at massive scale
Any mismatch between ERP and CRM data risked confusion across stores, sales teams, and service operations.
velo.port was indispensable, but it had no direct, scalable integration with Zoho CRM. Without a reliable bridge, e-motion faced growing complexity, data silos, and inefficiencies that threatened future growth.
"codafish correctly assessed the complexity of such a monumental CRM rollout into an existing network of franchise partners right from the start and planned accordingly."
Dennis SchmidtIT Project Manager, e-motion experts GmbHThe solution A Catalyst-powered bridge from ERP to CRM
codafish turned to Catalyst to build a future-proof integration layer between velo.port ERP and Zoho CRM. Using Catalyst’s serverless architecture, they created a bidirectional synchronization engine that quietly runs in the background, keeping both systems in perfect harmony.
How it works
- Real-time CRM → ERP sync: When contacts or accounts are created or modified in Zoho CRM, a Catalyst function generates XML files and places them on an FTP server for velo.port to consume.
- Daily ERP → CRM updates: Incoming CSV files from velo.port are processed by Catalyst to synchronize:
- Quotes
- Orders
- Invoices
- Products
- Holistic data relationships: Catalyst creates intelligent links between Contacts, Accounts, Products, and Deals modules, giving teams a 360° view of every customer and transaction.
- Serverless & scalable: Built on Catalyst, the system scales effortlessly as new stores, partners, and customers are added.
This integration layer is unique thanks to its:
- Purpose-built integration layer between ERP and CRM
- Bidirectional sync using XML, CSV, and FTP
- Zero manual intervention after setup
- Always-on reliability in the background
- Enterprise-scale performance without enterprise complexity
Benefits and ROI
| Feature | Before Catalyst | After Catalyst |
|---|---|---|
| Data flow | Manual, fragmented | Fully automated, bidirectional |
| ERP–CRM sync | Non-existent | Continuous & reliable |
| Franchise operations | Inconsistent data | Unified, real-time visibility |
| Scalability | Risky & complex | Effortless growth |
| Team workload | High manual effort | Near-zero admin overhead |
With their new, targeted solution successfully integrated, e-motion has seen:
31,000+ accounts synchronized
396,693 contacts unified
17,579 quotes, 11,680 orders, 8,392 invoices, and 10,514 products synced
100% consistency between ERP and CRM
Zero manual reconciliation for teams
Before Catalyst, franchise managers often waited days for order or invoice updates to appear across systems. Today, sales and service teams work from the same data, without checking, reconciling, or escalating issues. What once required constant oversight now runs silently and reliably.
codafish chose Catalyst for its native integration with Zoho CRM, its ability to connect seamlessly with external systems, its serverless scalability for enterprise-grade workloads, and its flexibility in building custom integration logic.
Key Catalyst features used
- Serverless Functions
- Event-driven workflows
- Secure file processing
- Scalable cloud runtime
Integrations
- Zoho CRM
- velo.port ERP
- FTP (XML & CSV exchange)
Catalyst became the invisible engine powering e-motion’s digital backbone.
Why Catalyst?
"Catalyst by Zoho is an essential part of our infrastructure. It works quietly and reliably in the background and performs its task absolutely reliably."
Dennis SchmidtIT Project Manager, e-motion experts GmbHLooking forward
With a unified ERP–CRM backbone in place, e-motion can now onboard new franchise partners faster, scale customer operations without friction, rely on a single source of truth, and expand confidently across regions.
codafish continues to evolve this architecture, building more end-to-end solutions on Catalyst that transform complexity into clarity.