EURONICS – SAP COMMERCE CLOUD B2B & B2C BUILD

Supercharging the digital experience with SAP Commerce Cloud

Combined Independent Holdings (CIH) are a collective of bricks ‘n’ mortar independent electrical retailers, who are partnered with Euronics, the largest electrical buying group in Europe. With 30 Member countries across Europe and 11,000 specialist stores and branches, reaching 600 million consumers, every agent in each country is a specialist in the field of Electrical goods. CIH operate the Euronics offering in the UK and each member of CIH is considered a Euronics ‘Agent’, which allows them access to utilise the Euronics branding and marketing materials. 

CIH commenced a digital business transformation journey to improve the digital experience for its Agents (B2B) and customers (B2C). The program focused on an SAP ERP upgrade while replacing all end-user purchasing channels for SAP Commerce Cloud. These systems would need to be fully integrated to provide a seamless customer and Agent experience while improving back-end operations. 

Objectives & Strategy

CIH needed a platform that allowed them to streamline the purchasing experience for time-poor Agents, while also leveraging modern content experiences so that they could communicate consistently with their Agents (such as offers, commercial opportunities and other general group engagements that maximises the advantages of being a collective). 

This platform would modernise the way in which they currently searched, browsed and placed complex orders for immediate delivery, future periodic delivery and exclusive trade show offers (the latter with stringent rules on supply) as well as self-managing queries such as invoicing, credit management and product claims processing.

What we did

SAP CX Commerce Cloud was selected as the platform to deliver these requirements due to its proven track record in delivering both B2B and B2C experiences that help businesses to grow.  

Working in tandem with our ERP partner, Atos, who was responsible for the SAP S/4HANA implementation, we conducted a number of detailed workshops and interview sessions to fully understand the requirements and explore solutions. These sessions touched on all aspects of the business and brought together the client’s detailed knowledge of its operation with our extensive experience of the technology product set. Due to the unique and complex nature of Euronics’ business model, this discovery phase took four months. A full functional and technical specification was produced along with the ERP ‘blueprint’ that detailed all the interfaces and custom logic that supported CIH’s business processes and offered the end-customer exciting new functionality.

Once we commenced the ‘build’ phase, we applied scrum-ceremonies to break down the work into iterative cycles. Within this context it allowed us to be more agile. Once feature and interface development were completed (along with internal testing processes), the solution moved into the various system testing and client acceptance stages. The acceptance and delivery were supported by a mixture of onsite guided consultancy, formally delivered training and written end-user materials.  

The new platform was launched in September 2018 and some of the key deliverables included: 

• Consolidation of the purchase systems from six to one single system for Agents
• Delivery of a new creative design brief, and user experience supporting multi-device response templates
• A state of the art B2C commerce platform experience that differentiates itself from the competition and engages with new and existing customers
• A portal for consistently communicating with agents such as offers, promotions and general merchandise information
• Enable CIH to retain full control of trading, merchandising and content without the need for technical skills or involvement day-to-day
• Seamless integration into the core SAP ERP solution to maximise Agent and customer order and invoice processing
• Provide an enterprise-grade solution to build the foundations of accelerated growth for the Agents and the Euronics brand

Going Forward

CIH have taken their first major step towards embracing a digitally-focused business in a market that is digitally mature and pushing the boundaries in retail and digital operations. 

We are currently working with Euronics to implement their next phase of growth – adding incremental functional enhancements as part of a progressive programme of improvement across the platform’s lifetime.

Visit Euronics website

Project Details

• Consultancy
• Creative direction
• ERP roadmap design
• UX design for desktop and mobile
• Technical delivery and system integration
• Platform: SAP Commerce Cloud
• Project timeline: 12 months