Relaunching FEGIME’s Extranet for Performance, Security and Scale

FEGIME Deutschland GmbH & Co. KG is a market community (purchasing and marketing cooperation) of around 45 independent, mostly family-run electrical wholesalers in Germany, founded in 1958. Its shareholder companies generated a combined turnover of about €2.4 billion in 2023 across roughly 160 locations and 3,500 employees. FEGIME centralizes services such as purchasing, marketing and IT — including a shared e-procurement solution and a webshop with around 4 million articles — to strengthen its shareholders' market position, and is itself a shareholder of the international FEGIME Group, active across Europe and South America.

FEGIME was experiencing long loading times, an outdated search and a grown menu structure. As a result, daily work became increasingly more difficult for FEGIME employees and stakeholders.

The developers who built and maintained their original extranet were approaching retirement and FEGIME was in search of a customized solution to revitalize their system. The technical debt had become too large to continue patching. Due to the individual, company-specific functions that needed to be preserved, including a strict permission system required for regulatory reasons, FEGIME sought out a technical partner with the ability to meet these needs.

After reading the Eurobaustoff case study, FEGIME approached punkt.de and stoked initial conversations about their experience implementing individual customer requirements. punkt.de convinced FEGIME of the value of running an on-site workshop in Nuremberg. The team at punkt.de utilizes this format to help them understand the precise requirements and prepare a proper proposal.

punkt.de stood out as an agency due to their open-source focus, experience with individual/custom development. Following their successful workshop, a shared understanding of FEGIME’s requirements and core values was also obtained.

FEGIME was looking for efficient communication both internally and externally, centralized information and document management, a refreshed, intuitive design with UX/UI optimization and most importantly, a strict rights/permission system that satisfies regulatory (antitrust/competition law) requirements.

The initial discovery workshop held on-site in Nuremberg established the working relationship and helped punkt.de gain a better understanding of FEGIME’s processes, core values and regulatory restraints. The team worked with FEGIME’s various departments in additional structured workshops together with design/UX partner agency “made in” to access existing processes and design a new working system for the extranet.

The team at punkt.de built the solution as a decoupled architecture: React frontend, TYPO3 backend for data, permissions and CLI/scheduler-based integrations, with an extensive automated test suite (Codeception/Gherkin for API, CLI and full-stack/browser tests; Playwright for nightly and post-deployment monitoring in production) plus security audits, dependency/SBOM checks and performance monitoring via nginx logs.

TYPO3 was chosen not as a page-rendering CMS but as a secure data and permissions backbone behind a decoupled React frontend, extended with custom permission logic (~30 tables) to handle FEGIME's complex, dynamically manageable rights structure across companies, departments, and committees. Combined with Solr-backed search and TYPO3's CLI/scheduler for integrating external systems, it delivers strong performance even under this complexity — around 20,000 permission-related calls handled in well under a second.

The work performed was done through an MVP first approach: defining the most important functions to help the team understand the highly complex, 15-year grown system. A knowledge-transfer was performed through the product owner at punkt.de who ramped up meetings, documentation and the prototype. The team also introduced “FEGIME Information Days” to explain the new extranet and its roadmap directly to the end users.

The new extranet was rolled out via a soft-launch, running both the old and new systems in parallel until all required functionality was available in the new system. This was done to increase user acceptance and reduce the risk of the switch. The new extranet reports a high user acceptance, recorded during the parallel soft-launch phase of the legacy system. 

FEGIME’s relaunched extranet is a high-performance, custom permission system which includes ~20,000 permission checks and roughly 29,000 server requests handled with page-generation times consistently under one second. Extensive automated quality assurance is in place with 1,122 tests which include interface tests, nearly 100 frontend tests, security audits, dependency/SBOM checks on every deployment and nightly Playwright monitoring in production.

The knowledge transfer was successful from the original extranet developers. This exchange and collaboration resolved the “Techdebt” risk significantly.

The collaboration between FEGIME and punkt.de is ongoing. Further modules are being rolled out and a "continuous relaunch” is being carried out as the partnership continues to deepen.

The engagement also included the relaunch of FEGIME’s corporate website, on toujou, punkt.de’s managed TYPO3 product.