About Stadium AB

Stadium AB is Sweden's largest sports retail chain, founded in 1987 and headquartered in Norrköping. The company's mission is straightforward: to inspire as many people as possible to discover the benefits of an active lifestyle. LinkedIn
With approximately 160 stores across Sweden, and  Finland — complemented by specialty formats Stadium Ski and Stadium Outlet — Stadium has established a broad retail footprint in the Nordic region and beyond. GetProspect The business concept centers on offering modern, functional sports and sportswear at the best possible price.

The company's product range spans sports goods, sportswear, bicycles, and related accessories Bloomberg, serving everyone from competitive athletes to families looking to lead a more active life. Stadium emphasizes sustainable practices within its retail operations, reflecting growing consumer demand for environmentally conscious brands. 

Industry

Retail

Challenge

As Stadium Sverige AB expanded its supplier network, onboarding remained manual, email-driven, and dependent on supplier response times. Each new partner required repetitive testing, back-and-forth communication, and manual validation of message flows. This created operational bottlenecks, unpredictable timelines, and limited the ability to onboard suppliers in parallel. As volumes increased, the risk became structural: growth was constrained by manual capacity rather than market opportunity.

Results

With Btwentyfour BOT implemented as onboarding infrastructure, manual validations were reduced to almost zero and onboarding time dropped from days or weeks to just hours. Automated rule-based testing minimized email exchanges, standardized compliance, and enabled parallel supplier onboarding at scale. What was previously a bottleneck became a predictable, scalable process — unlocking measurable supplier expansion and supporting significant order value and volume growth. Onboarding shifted from a manual task to a growth-enabling capability.

Growth was accelerating. Onboarding couldn’t keep up.

Stadium Sverige AB was expanding its supplier network rapidly to meet increasing market demand. But onboarding remained manual, email-driven, and dependent on supplier response times.

Every new supplier required:

• Back-and-forth email exchanges
• Manual validation of messages
• Repeated checks across multiple document types
• Individual oversight from onboarding specialists

This created structural risk.

Onboarding timelines stretched from days to weeks.
Validation quality varied.
Internal teams were tied up in repetitive testing instead of strategic work.

As supplier volumes increased, the bottleneck intensified.

Without change, Stadium faced:

• Slower supplier expansion
• Limited ability to onboard in parallel
• Operational unpredictability
• Increased risk of errors at scale

Manual onboarding was no longer sustainable in a high-growth retail environment.

 

From manual testing to growth infrastructure.

Stadium implemented Btwentyfour BOT — not simply as an automation tool, but as onboarding infrastructure designed for scalable retail growth.

Instead of manually validating each supplier message, Stadium:

• Defined validation rules and scenarios upfront
• Standardized compliance requirements
• Let BOT automatically test and approve message flows
• Shifted from reactive email exchanges to rule-based automation

As Tobias Teimark, Application Specialist at Stadium, explains:

“Automated testing has saved us a lot of time. By defining all scenarios up front and letting the BOT handle validation, we no longer need to manually test each message type. For the first suppliers, you can run manual checks in parallel — but once you see it working, there’s no reason to go back.”

This fundamentally changed onboarding from a manual task to a scalable system. What was once linear and people-dependent became parallel, predictable, and growth-ready. BOT became the operational layer enabling supplier expansion — without increasing headcount or complexity.

Automation didn’t just improve efficiency. It unlocked growth.

By removing onboarding as a bottleneck, Stadium transformed supplier expansion into a scalable capability.

Operational Impact

• Manual validations: Reduced to almost zero
• Onboarding time per supplier: From days/weeks → to hours
• Email exchanges per supplier: Reduced to 1–2
• Time saved per supplier: 1–2 hours

Growth Outcomes Enabled by Scalable Onboarding

• 271 brands onboarded
• +681% order count growth
• +243% order value growth

The connection is clear:

When onboarding became automated and parallelized, supplier expansion accelerated.
When supplier expansion accelerated, transaction volume scaled.
When transaction volume scaled, business growth followed.

By defining rules once and letting automation enforce them, Stadium achieved:

• Predictable onboarding timelines
• Standardized supplier compliance
• Reduced operational risk
• Infrastructure capable of supporting continued expansion

Automated onboarding is now the new standard — not as a feature, but as a strategic growth enabler.

What This Means for Retail Leaders

If onboarding is manual, growth will always depend on capacity.
If onboarding is automated, growth becomes structural.

Stadium moved from reactive, email-based validation to scalable onboarding infrastructure — enabling expansion without friction.