case study
Revitalizing e-commerce excellence: a comprehensive digital transformation journey
Sven Van Hoorebeeck
With a global footprint and strong growth through acquisitions, a leading B2B parts retailer partnered with BrightWolves to future-proof its digital operations. Facing an increasingly complex IT landscape and outdated e-commerce platform, the company launched a major digital transformation to simplify architecture, improve performance, and elevate the customer experience across its online channels, which account for 80% of total revenue.
Challenge
The company’s legacy application landscape had evolved in fragmented ways, leading to slow system performance, limited agility, and operational inefficiencies. Most urgently, the outdated e-commerce platform—responsible for 75% of revenue—fell short on both usability and customer expectations. Customers lacked visibility into freight costs and delivery dates and were forced to choose from long lists of carriers rather than selecting delivery options. The checkout process was clunky, slow, and inconsistent across markets. To stay competitive, the company needed to overhaul its order-to-cash (OTC) journey and launch a more modern, intuitive digital experience—fast.
We assessed end-to-end processes, challenging the existing approach. We pushed for global standardization and simplified processes, ensuring a seamless customer experience aligned with their needs.
Approach
We employed our proven six-step approach to define and roll-out a modern, customer-centric e-commerce platform:
1. AS-IS Diagnostics: Assess the current e-commerce setup and customer journey, as well as define the client’s vision and strategy on the future of e-commerce for its organisation. Identify current value drivers and areas where the client stands out in the market, serving as focus for the TO-BE.
2. Map New Processes: Analyze and define new order-to-cash (OTC) processes through workshops. Establish uniform global processes and articulate a common understanding of customer experience, through customer journeys, that will ensure alignment across business stakeholders.
3. Design + Feasibility: Design e-commerce platform mock-ups with a specific focus on the OTC funnel. Take into account both technical constraints and opportunities presented by the new back-end system, while never losing sight of the customer impact throughout the design process.
4. Iterative Client Validation: A key success factor was to work in small increments, and iterate frequently on the designs with key stakeholders, so adjustments could be made quickly.
5. Implementation: Continuous alignment with the client’s implementation partner during the build and roll out the new e-commerce platform. Not only to track project progress, but to ensure questions, constraints and risks were addressed quickly. Furthermore, this allowed to test the e-commerce platform and its integration with the back-end systems first hand, ensuring quality before moving to User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
6. Go Live + Next Steps: After the go-live, keep track of flaws due to technical immaturity and outline next steps for design optimization in later phases. Start with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and prioritize continuous innovation to stay ahead in the market.
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Impact
Although e-commerce had initially been left out of the transformation scope, BrightWolves helped reposition it at the heart of the initiative. We engaged key teams early, refined user journeys, and reimagined the platform experience based on real customer feedback.
Notable results include:
Freight cost and delivery date transparency: Customers now see shipping options, delivery dates, and associated costs in one glance.
Free shipping bar: A real-time bar shows customers how close they are to unlocking free shipping.
Scheduled orders: Users can plan deliveries in advance to match their operational needs.
Faster checkout: With fewer steps, automatic preference selection, and clear UI, the new platform enables faster conversions.
Order tracking: Orders can be tracked with visual indicators and links to track-and-trace codes, with issue alerts built into the interface.
Through global standardization, simplified processes, and a focus on customer needs, the company has set a new standard for e-commerce in its industry.
Summary
A leading B2B parts retailer partnered with BrightWolves to modernize its outdated e-commerce platform, which accounted for the majority of its revenue.
We redefined the order-to-cash journey, simplified global processes, and designed a customer-centric platform through iterative co-creation and hands-on implementation support.
Key features like delivery transparency, faster checkout, and real-time order tracking significantly improved the user experience.
By placing e-commerce at the core of its digital transformation, the company now sets a new benchmark for online excellence in its industry.