Replatforming for Success: Navigating the Future of B2B
Atul Jain
12-03-2023
The importance of meticulous planning for B2B Commerce replatforming cannot be overstated. As organizations globally pursue digital transformation, revamping their B2B commerce platforms has become an integral part of this journey. Numerous enterprises are encumbered by complex IT ecosystems and outdated legacy B2B ordering systems that fail to meet the demands of a modern commerce landscape. Despite the functional richness of these legacy systems—often the result of years of tailored development—the imperative to replatform is driven by several critical factors:
- Accelerated Feature Deployment: In today’s competitive market, businesses are pressured to rapidly innovate and release new features. Legacy platforms, with their inherent complexity, cannot keep pace with this demand, putting enterprises at a disadvantage.
- Enhanced Customer Experience: B2B buyers now expect a consumer-grade shopping experience, a phenomenon known as the “Consumerization” of B2B. Legacy platforms, due to their architectural constraints, often fall short in delivering this modern customer experience (CX).
- Reduced Total Cost of Ownership: Legacy systems typically reside on-premise and operate under a traditional licensing model. They are costly to maintain, especially as expertise in older technologies becomes scarce. Conversely, contemporary commerce suites are increasingly available as cost-effective Software as a Service (SaaS) options, and some even offer pay-per-use pricing models.
The challenge for enterprises lies in reconciling the urgency to overcome these issues with a lack of in-house technical expertise to build a fit-for-purpose platform. As a result, many turn to established Enterprise Commerce Suites like SAP CX Suite, Salesforce Commerce, Intershop or Cloudsuite.
At their core, these suites offer essential B2B features such as customer organization hierarchies, customer-specific pricing and assortments, and approval workflows. However, the complexity and uniqueness of enterprise use cases are often underestimated by both enterprises and software vendors. Customizations are frequently necessary, particularly for intricate industry specific requirements.
Without a well-managed transformation process from the outset, enterprises risk dissatisfaction with vendors, budget overruns, planning delays, and suboptimal outcomes. Under timeline pressures, Digital leaders may resort to porting features to a service layer external to the commerce platform. While this can be a strategically sound decision, the aim should be to avoid such challenges.
Here are recommendations for a smoother B2B Commerce platform migration:
- Understand the benefits of an Enterprise commerce platform, which offers a robust, scalable transaction engine among other fundamental features. In-house development of a commerce platform is seldom advisable unless aiming to rival Amazon.
- The platform selection process should extend beyond a simple checklist of features. It should include a detailed discovery phase to fully understand business needs and proof-of-concept exercises with real data for complex use cases.
- Use the migration as a chance to review and refine existing processes. Blindly transferring “as is” features can lead to unnecessary development work. Where possible, adapt processes to align with the functional flows of the new platform.
- Recognize that commerce platforms are designed for generic industry-wide use cases. Unique enterprise requirements can be addressed through minor customizations or by developing external service layers.
- Long-term cost savings may be realized by building and deploying complex, unique features in a service layer, avoiding the need to redevelop these components with each migration.
- Employ a ‘best of breed’ approach, choosing specialized tools for major processes, like CMS, PIM, Search, approval workflows etc.
- Develop phased customer onboarding strategies to stabilize the platform with a lower risk profile, allowing for iterative improvements based on feedback.
- Invest in comprehensive training materials for both end-users and business stakeholders to ease the transition to the new platform.
- Lastly, if in-house expertise is lacking, partner with a knowledgeable consultant to navigate the complexities of platform migration.
In summary, while the intricacies of B2B commerce are significant, they can be managed effectively within budget and time constraints, and without compromising quality. This requires meticulous planning and execution, alongside proactive leadership from IT and business executives.