Česká zbrojovka: a new customer club, live before the old platform switched off

Client context

Česká zbrojovka makes CZ pistols and rifles in Uherský Brod, Czech Republic, sells them around the world and is part of Colt CZ Group. Its subsidiary CZ-USA serves the American market. The CZ Customer Club is where owners register their guns, see their warranties and get support, in the US and in the rest of the world.

The real problem

The club ran on a subscription platform, and the subscription was ending. By the end of the summer the club had to be fully replaced, with every member and registration moved across. The old platform also could not tell product variants apart: different SKUs sat under one main product. Yet warranty rules, documents and spare parts all depend on knowing exactly which gun an owner has.

The brief asked for one place for owners, customer service and marketing. Registration by serial number, checked against the company's own data in SAP. US and rest-of-world warranty rules, applied correctly. A warranty that can pass to a new owner. And reuse of the product data the company already keeps, not a second copy of it.

Where we started

Česká zbrojovka chose its supplier by tender. We answered with a working application instead of slides. By the final round it had 26 screens for owners and administrators, a barcode and QR scanner for serial numbers, a PDF warranty certificate and a seven-minute demo video. The company's IT and security team sent twenty technical questions and a sixteen-point security questionnaire, and we answered them in writing. We won the tender in June 2026 and started development in July.

What we built

An owner signs in with a one-time code by SMS or e-mail, enters or scans the serial number, and the gun appears in My Products with its warranty status, documents and spare parts. Behind that one step, the portal looks the serial number up in SAP, gets back the product and the date it was made, and applies the US or the rest-of-world warranty rules. SAP stays the system of record: the portal only reads from it. A serial number SAP does not know is checked against the US serial import. If that fails too, the owner picks the product and the registration waits for review instead of being refused.

• Exact product matching. Each product variant can be matched on its own SKU, main or alternative, so the profile, documents, spare parts and exploded view fit the gun the owner actually has.

• Support in one place. Tickets with notifications and attachments, proof-of-purchase upload and product reviews.

• One administration, split by market. Roles for the USA and for the rest of the world, sign-in with a password plus a mandatory one-time code, and US serial lists imported from CSV with duplicate checks.

• Connected, not copied. Product and dealer data sync from the company's product database, and news and visuals come from czfirearms.com, so the club looks like the rest of the brand.

It runs in Česká zbrojovka's own cloud, with separate test and production environments. The stack is open source, and each integration lives in its own module, so one connection can change without touching the rest. Since launch we keep improving it in small releases, as the teams that use it ask for changes.

The results

• About eight weeks from the start of development to production. The club went live on 14 September 2026, the day the old subscription ended. The old address has redirected to the new club since 15 September.

• A working application in the bid, not slides. Česká zbrojovka saw the product before it chose the supplier.

• The old platform's records moved over, with duplicates cleaned on the way.

• Three teams in one system. Customer service, the US team and marketing all work in it.

What we learned

The data was not ready, and the deadline would not move. The member export carried no SKUs and no manufacturing dates, and the product data had never been linked to SAP. We could have waited for clean master data, or looked each record up in SAP one at a time, tens of thousands of calls. Instead, the company's SAP team enriched the whole file in one pass, marketing built the mapping of main and alternative SKUs, and we added provisional registrations: an owner can register today, and the record is completed once the data is there. Launching on time meant designing for the gaps, not waiting for them to close.