SAP C/4HANA as an e-commerce solution in B2B

Around a quarter of B2B e-commerce sales are generated via websites, online stores and marketplaces. Since 2012, e-commerce sales in the B2B sector have been growing by an average of 15% annually. It now amounts to around 320 billion euros. This is potential that companies in the digital world cannot afford to miss out on.

But how do you successfully install an online platform? Quite a few companies already set up an online store some time ago, either to offer an additional ordering channel or to automate processes.

The particular challenges that B2B online sales entail are therefore well known: On the one hand, redundant processes that literally "call out" for automation.

On the other hand, multi-level sales and different customer discounts and conditions, for example, make it much more complex than in the B2C sector.

Rights and role management is required; deliveries and services by the field service and often also contract manufacturing must be coordinated. This requires deep integration into merchandise management and ERP systems.

B2B customers want convenient and clear search and input functions as well as consistency across all channels - in short, a customer experience that they are also used to as users from the B2C sector. They can find this on the large platforms that are now conquering the market, such as Amazon Business, Mercateo and Contorion.

So when it comes to own stores or platforms, it's about both a better customer experience and clearly positioning the added value for customers.

Medium-sized companies already have a wealth of data and knowledge about customer needs and preferences. These advantages of often long-standing customer relationships need to be utilized.

Brand management, e-commerce and process integration

Online, comparable products are often just a click away. It is therefore important to focus not only on your own product, but also on the company's overall performance.

It is no longer just goods and services that customers perceive and evaluate, but also all the benefits that make the overall offering attractive to them - such as additional services, special quality, a branch network and a service network.

These services are one of the things that make up a brand. This changes branding, which is still too often neglected in B2B anyway.

Customer experience in e-commerce should be seen as a building block of the brand experience. A clearly programmed online store is important.

More important, however, is the omnichannel approach: what counts is the overall experience across the entire customer journey. This results in three areas of responsibility that influence each other:

• Customer experience to sustainably strengthen the brand and competitiveness
• E-commerce solution as part of a sustainable business model
• Stable technical connection to existing processes

A holistic approach has proven successful in previous projects. The starting point is the questions:

Where do we need to be as a brand in five years' time in order to survive alongside the large retail platforms or the competition, e.g. from Asia? What should our value chains look like?

The ideas with the greatest business value are implemented first, i.e. projects that promise a high ROI and can be realized quickly.

End-to-end solution

This also raises the question of the technical basis: Which applications are recommended for the online store or the planned platform?

The SAP C4/HANA Customer Experience Suite is recommended for companies that already use SAP as their ERP system. SAP's suite consists of the five pillars SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Service Cloud and SAP Customer Data Cloud.

With the C4 Suite, SAP has focused on the topic of customer experience and, with its solutions, provides a set of tools that enables companies and brands to offer the best customer experience.

The back-end integration of C/4HANA with S/4HANA is a big plus. The switch to S/4HANA is already on the agenda of many IT managers, as support for the existing Business Suite has been limited to 2025.

The integration of C/4HANA is simple compared to the effort required by solutions from other manufacturers. ERP and C4/HANA systems as well as other systems involved, such as the warehouse management system, can be combined to create an end-to-end solution.

It is important to select an SAP partner who can provide the company with comprehensive support. The service provider should support the company with the strategy as well as with the implementation and design of the front and back end of the e-commerce platform.

Know-how in related business processes such as master data management and connection to third-party marketplaces or accounting, warehouse logistics and ERP software is also very important.

This is the only way to guarantee that all e-commerce processes ultimately function consistently without having to integrate and manage numerous different service providers.

Of course, the investment costs for SAP's Customer Experience Suite are not low, but the recommendation is not to implement the entire solution immediately. Instead, only individual modules can be used for the initial solutions. Thanks to the end-to-end integration of the systems, companies also benefit from more efficient processes in the short term, meaning that the investment pays off quickly.

For manufacturing companies, the first step is often the introduction of an e-commerce platform (in the case of the C/4HANA suite, this would be the SAP Commerce Cloud), which supports the development of an international sales network with little effort or makes the work of existing sales partners considerably easier.

In the case of a supplier of car accessories, not only was order processing significantly simplified, but all information on marketing campaigns, products and their compatibility, as well as sales arguments for all importers worldwide, were controlled on a country-specific basis via a central hub.

Winning with digital services

At the same time, the SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP's e-commerce platform, provides a very comprehensive toolbox that also enables other applications that would ultimately be much more complex and expensive to develop in-house.

Another practical example: a medium-sized retailer specializing in tool deliveries was looking for an e-commerce solution that would be flexible enough to also offer corporate customers added value in areas such as service.

With the help of SAP Commerce (formerly SAP Hybris Commerce), the implementation was successful. The new service links online and offline services and includes the nightly replenishment of vehicles.

The Group customer's field staff can park their vehicles at home in the evening and start work the next morning with a full stock.

Highly paid specialists who are in demand on the market can thus devote themselves to tasks that do justice to their actual value creation potential. Over 4000 sales representatives are now registered on the platform.

As the examples show: As an end-to-end solution and developed from the customer's perspective, online platforms can be used in B2B to set yourself apart from the competition.

B2B companies that want to remain successful in the long term should act now to convince and retain their customers with well thought-out offers.

Company profile

As an SAP Gold Partner, FIS Informationssysteme und Consulting GmbH forms the umbrella of the FIS Group with over 700 employees.

Together with its subsidiary Medienwerft - an expert in e-branding and e-commerce - FIS covers the entire range of SAP C4/HANA CX Suite topics.

This puts the FIS Group in an outstanding position to support the entire SAP CX process chain, from commerce and marketing to service and sales, right through to SAP's technical infrastructure, with solutions from a single source.