B2B E-Business for GUNZ

A case study on international sales

The challenge

The food wholesaler Gunz already had an online ordering platform for its business customers from the food retail trade before the introduction of the ICONPARC e-business solution. Weaknesses in performance and in the implementation of search and ordering processes led to the consideration of replacing the platform in order to achieve a significant increase in acceptance on the customer side. In addition, there were many orders by telephone or fax that had to be manually transferred to the ERP system. This in turn turned out to be costly and error-prone due to the media discontinuity. In addition, the IT service provider at the time announced that it was changing its company orientation and therefore no longer supported the ordering platform.
Gunz therefore developed the plan to strengthen the loyalty of its business customers by significantly increasing the benefits of the online channel. On the strategic side, this would also counteract the danger that individual product manufacturers would turn directly to retailers with their own digitization projects, bypassing the wholesale trade.

 

In order to really convince retailers, the entire ordering process should have to function with maximum efficiency, clarity and speed. In particular, it was necessary to take into account that distribution takes place in more than 100 countries - with highly customer-specific pricing models, country-specific product ranges, many special cases and exceptions.

The result

The ICONPARC team extensively researched how retailers prefer to shop. According to the findings gained in the analysis phase, we developed a purchasing process optimized exactly for this purpose, which makes ordering extremely convenient and fast - even with many orders, some of which contain several hundred items.

Further optimization potential resulted from the involvement of the internal sales team: Since the introduction of the ICONPARC e-business solution, Gunz employees have also been using it to record telephone and fax orders. For customers it seems as if they had ordered online themselves. In turn, the internal sales staff know the e-business platform so well that they can support customers in using it effortlessly and with conviction.

To ensure maximum performance and availability at all times, several server systems are used. The TurboCart module enables lightning-fast shopping carts with hundreds of order items. Multilingualism, local currencies etc. are of course also part of the international solution for Gunz. And very important: The system determines customer-specific assortments, prices and availabilities ad hoc and displays them without delay.

The effect

The new Gunz e-business platform is available 24x7 and offers outstanding performance. Liquid ordering from the customer-specific assigned assortment and with individual prices is now possible at any time - even with hundreds of items in one order.

More and more buyers are switching from telephone and fax orders to the faster and more convenient online ordering. This saves personnel costs for Gunz, increases customer loyalty through satisfaction, which in turn strengthens the image of the food wholesaler. Sales have developed even better than initially forecast - Gunz is well prepared for further growth.

Since the go-live in September 2015, new ideas have been continuously developed and implemented within the scope of further expansion stages of the B2B solution ... to be continued.

 

Convince yourself!

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