znode feeds ecommerce growth for nutricia
Situation
Nutricia North America, a division of Danone North America, is a company that manufactures and markets advanced medical nutrition for disease management that extends and completes Danone’s mission to bring health through food to as many people as possible. Nutricia North America sells to a variety of healthcare wholesalers and distributors, home healthcare organizations, hospitals, and pharmacies. Nutricia North America started searching for a best-in-class ecommerce solution for its B2B trade customers to replace a very antiquated online ordering platform.
Challenge
Nutricia North America’s vision was to move all B2B trade order to cash online through a single platform, or a center of ecommerce for the company. A clear set of requirements was established: integration with a new ERP, product and order search, merchandising capabilities, pricing, inventory and ordering. Nutricia needed to build the ecommerce platform solution and simultaneously integrate it with its new ERP. The previous platform was only a module of the old ERP platform that had very limited capabilities. With the newly selected platform, Nutricia North America sought to expand product content, strengthen search, provide customers with multiple ways to add products to a cart, and provide accurate pricing based on multiple pricing lists for its customers. Multi-store ecommerce management was one Nutricia’s biggest needs for the potential to deliver long-term digital transformation in serving consumers on product specific websites, as well B2B accounts through an order portal including EDI and punchout orders.
Nutricia wanted to increase customer satisfaction and adoption by building a contemporary customer experience for all online purchasing situations. Customers needed to easily place orders with fewer clicks, which necessitated multiple order entry options, such as quick entry, CSV upload, phone-placed order with a customer service representative through customer impersonation.
Other customer ordering requirements included showing various types of order status and shipment tracking throughout the fulfillment journey, and the ability to search order history and invoices. Customers also needed the ability to add an unlimited number of shipping addresses and easily and quickly search for those shipping addresses at check out to allow customers to manage hundreds of drop-ship customers’ addresses.
Solution
Nutricia decided to re-platform on Znode’s enterprise ecommerce platform to solve both basic and complex challenges. Nutricia’s required ERP integration was enabled by the platform’s extensible technology which has a base of 1200+ API-endpoints.
In Znode, Nutricia found a platform capable of performing essential functionality such as site search for products which can be managed across multiple stores with automatic indexing. Znode’s Product Information Management (PIM) system and Digital Asset Management (DAM) system allowed Nutricia to enhance product content and provide ingredient lists or storage and mixing instructions on product detail pages (PDP) to enhance customer experience.
The Znode pricing engine allows multiple price lists to be associated with a single SKU. Nutricia was able to use this pricing engine to associate specific customer accounts with appropriate pricing. Znode’s Order Management System (OMS) enabled the inventory level masking that Nutricia needed for its distribution customers.
The OMS also enabled multiple order entry options and add-to-cart options for multiple pages including product listing pages, product detail pages, and the home page. Designed for B2B ecommerce, Znode gave Nutricia customers the ability to select ship-to addresses (including both pre-existing and custom address types). Similar ordering functionality enabled order status tracking, and past order finding for Nutricia B2B customers.
Znode enables Nutricia to continue its digital transformation journey by allowing the company to launch new product specific web stores for consumers, and web stores for B2B accounts without adding additional tech stacks, platform licenses and resource costs.
“Znode allows us to better meet our customers’ needs by enabling product discovery, pricing complexity, multiple ordering options, and more. Znode’s central data model and B2B capabilities solved merchandising issues and has set us up to potentially transition our B2C ecommerce business to the platform.”
- Nutricia Ecommerce Strategy Manager