B2B E-Business for Gröner

A case study about distribution

Karl Gröner GmbH is a traditional specialist dealer for advertising technology. The extensive product range of the family-owned company from Ulm includes around 120,000 articles from the areas of films, screen printing, advertising textiles and decoration systems as well as digital services and large equipment system solutions.

27,3 Mio. € Turnover

71 % Online sales

120,000 Products

110 Employees

The Challenge

Gröner planned to introduce a B2B e-business platform in 2002, primarily to make the manual receipt of orders by telephone or fax more efficient and less prone to errors. In particular, the transfer to the ERP system was to be automated, while at the same time relieving the sales office. Gröner intended to offer its business customers more service in order to bind them more closely to the company.

The Solution

The B2B e-business experts of ICONPARC comprehensively examined how product selection and purchase processing could be optimized. On the basis of the findings, we developed online processes that were precisely tailored to this. As a result, placing orders has become more convenient and faster than ever before.


In a further expansion step, the Gröner internal sales team has also converted its order acceptance to the new B2B e-business platform. Instead of laboriously entering orders placed by phone or fax into the ERP system, the office staff now also use the online platform themselves as the most efficient way to enter order data - with automatic transfer into the ERP system. An important side effect of this approach: Office staff know the B2B solution so well that they can support customers in its use without any problems and with conviction. For customers, even when interacting with Gröner by phone, it feels as if they had ordered online: For example, customers receive the same e-mail notifications about incoming orders or logistical processing.

 

Applied highlights from ICONPARC's module program: The module TurboCart enables lightning-fast shopping carts with hundreds of order items. The module MultiChannel ensures an optimized presentation of the B2B solution on all relevant end devices. In B2B FRONTEND, individual assortments, prices and availabilities, which are originally available in the ERP system, are immediately determined and displayed. The underlying interface technology is included in the InterfaceToolkit from ICONPARC.

Results

The Gröner B2B platform is available 24x7 and offers exceptional performance, i.e. the B2B FRONTEND reacts practically instantaneously to all interactions with customers and prospects. Thanks to the optimized processes, order entry is extremely simple, taking into account the respective customer-specific product range and individual prices. 27,3 million € turnover in 2021 and thus 71% via the B2B e-business platform. The results achieved in practice speak for themselves: digital transformation pays off!

 

It is therefore only logical that since go-live in 2002, numerous optimizations and enhancements have been implemented in the course of expansion phases. Most recently, Gröner carried out a comprehensive relaunch of the B2B e-business platform in April 2018, combined with many new highlights.

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