Every project has a story. This is the story of Drive Medical, SAP, and e-commerce.
Download a PDF of the Drive Medical SAP e-commerce project case study.
Drive Medical -- a manufacturer of durable medical equipment -- has corporate offices and distribution facilities in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Romania, China and Taiwan.
Before working with b2b2dot0, the company was struggling to maintain and update its online catalog. Consequently, information in the catalog got out of date pretty quickly, which made the company hesitant to aggressively promote the online catalog to customers.
In addition, the catalog wasn't connected to the company's SAP system. This meant that CSRs were manually entering orders into SAP. It wasn't a pretty picture.
Using our agile development methodology, b2b2dot0 delivered an SAP-integrated e-commerce portal in 90 days.
Excerpts
The Background
"Back in 2008, we were in desperate need to overhaul our web presence. From a branding and informational perspective, our public website wasn’t worthy of our company. In addition, while we interact with many of our customers via EDI, a large number of them prefer ordering over the web. However, at the time, our web channel was very inefficient."
"While Drive Medical looked at the website overhaul as one big project, it really was two: a corporate website including a product catalog and a B2B Order Management Portal.
In those days, it was not easy for our Marketing Department to maintain our online catalog. Consequently, information got out of date pretty quickly. That, in turn, made us hesitate to aggressively promote its use to our customers. In addition, since the website wasn’t directly connected to our SAP system, our CSRs were entering orders into SAP manually. The situation wasn’t much different for inbound faxes and emails. It wasn’t a pretty picture."
The Decision
"Time was of the essence. Our customers had been asking us to improve our online presence and we were late to respond.... "
"SAP’s CRM was an obvious first choice. However, it looked like it was going to be a very labor intensive process to implement with all sorts of customizing required. All that meant to me was that we would become dependent on consultants for quite awhile. The last thing I wanted to do was to maintain yet another “heavy” system."
"...ease of implementation became an overriding factor for us. If we could get the job done quickly, it would go a long way to mitigating our risk."
The Implementation
"...Your simple implementation model really benefited us. We could ask for something to be done, you would quickly deliver it, we would evaluate it and then move on. We were able to make mistakes and recover without going over budget."