Electrical retailer group Combined Independent Holdings (CIH) and its partner Euronics needed a platform that would streamline the purchasing experience for CIH’s time-poor retailers (agents) and their customers.

The new site also had to leverage modern content experiences, such as offers, commercial opportunities and group engagements, so that CIH could communicate consistently with their agents.

This platform would modernise the way in which agents searched, browsed and placed complex orders for immediate delivery, future periodic delivery and exclusive trade show offers (the latter with stringent rules on supply). It also needed the capability to self-manage queries such as invoicing, credit management and product claims processing.

SAP CX Commerce Cloud was selected as the platform to deliver these requirements due to its proven track record in delivering both B2B and B2C experiences that help businesses grow.

Working in tandem with our ERP partner, Atos, who was responsible for the SAP S/4HANA implementation, we conducted in-depth workshops and interview sessions to fully understand the requirements and explore solutions. These sessions touched on all aspects of the business and brought together the client’s detailed knowledge of its operation with our extensive experience of the technology product set. Due to the unique and complex nature of Euronics’ business model, this discovery phase took four months. A full functional and technical specification was produced along with the ERP blueprint that detailed all the interfaces and custom logic that supported CIH’s business processes and offered the end customer exciting new functionality.

Once we commenced the ‘build’ phase, we applied scrum-ceremonies to break down the work into iterative cycles. Within this context it allowed us to be more agile. Once feature and interface development were completed (along with internal testing processes), the solution moved into the various system testing and client acceptance stages. The acceptance and delivery were supported by a mixture of onsite guided consultancy, formally delivered training and written end-user materials.

Since the launch of the new platform, we’ve continued to partner with Euronics to implement their next growth phase – adding incremental functional enhancements as part of an improvement strategy across the platform’s lifetime.