Success Stories  to overview

Bühler AG offers more convenience in ordering spare parts

By introducing a specially designed webshop for selling replacement parts, Bühler AG hoped to profit from an increase in customer retention and from the implementation of more effective ordering processes. The new sales medium should convince customers with quick, convenient and clear processes, as well as with “round-the-clock availability”.

Customers need to be able to filter out the correct article themselves from the huge product range. This has been achieved by using customer-specific spare part catalogs which display the relevant product range graphically. That means: if a customer registers in the shop, he will receive a list of the Bühler machines used at his company in his personal product catalog, as well as a display of all the related spare parts together with information on price and availability. The replacement part shop was implemented using SAP E-Commerce for ERP and a good reason for doing so was, in particular, the high level of integration with the SAP ERP system used, as well as the possibility of being able to extend the shop to a customer portal if required.

Challenges

• Setting up customer-individual product catalogs
• Checking availability of replacement parts online 
• Adapting interfaces to the corporate design of Bühler AG to enable the seamless insertion of the shop into the available extranet application.

Results

• An increase in customer retention due to simple and quick ordering processes and improved availability
• High level of integration with SAP ERP, and therefore
  
  • Access to replacement part material data in ERP
  • Access to the related prices
  • Ability to check availability easily
  • Automatic order processing: orders are transmitted directly to the ERP system and flow into the logistics chain.
  • Interface adapters are not necessary for release updates
• Cost reduction due to more effective processes in ordering and order processing
• Individual and appealing layouts for an attractive user interface

Success factors

• Industrial and solution know-how
• Connection to the software ordering platforms at the customer

Technologies

• SAP R/3
• SAP E-Commerce for ERP