Integrating a new and improved manufacturing ecommerce platform

Atlas Copco is a Swedish multinational industrial company, founded in 1873. It is best-known for manufacturing industrial tools and equipment. The Atlas Copco Group is a global industrial group of companies headquartered in Nacka, Sweden, operates in 180 countries and has an annual turnover of €13 billion. Atlas Copco companies develop, manufacture, service, and rent out industrial tools, air compressors (of which it is the world's leading producer), construction and assembly systems. The Group operates in four areas: Compressor Technique, Vacuum Technique, Power Technique and Industrial Technique.

Grown by acquisitions, Atlas Copco serves a wide variety of industries with many different Atlas Copco brands. However, this dispersed organization led to many different technologies. The Industrial Technique Business Area (ITBA) initially came to Valtech with the challenge to make doing business with Atlas Copco easier for their clients, by leveraging digital in this complex global setting.

Valtech was challenged to replace their incumbent, outdated order portal with a worldwide future-proof manufacturing ecommerce platform. Thus, offering a uniform customer experience and increasing the efficiency of the internal organization. The vision was to “provide an easy to use & efficient digital business platform, to become a digital leader in B2B.”

Other important goals were to further increase online revenue and reduce administrative inefficiency, thus making life easier for customer centers worldwide.

The digital transformation program for ITBA spans across all brands and geographies. Valtech was selected because of its extensive B2B commerce consulting knowledge and global rollout experience. Because every brand wants to differentiate and countries have their own requirements, a multidisciplinary way of working was needed to make this program a success. Here’s how we made it happen:

Phase 1: Defining ecommerce needs

Every country started their new ecommerce journey with an assessment of the current and to-be state. In the definition phase, we defined the balance between centralized ecommerce vs local requirements and translated this into a solid and scalable architecture. After this, the development teams were able to hit the ground running.

ITBA consists of several brands that sell different products to different customer groups. Therefore, it was important that each brand could provide its own identity. Brand UX played an important role when defining the rollout plan for the different brands.

Phase 2: Choosing a manufacturing ecommerce platform

Atlas Copco selected the Intershop ecommerce platform to accommodate all the complexities that come with B2B in an international and multi-brand context. Intershop allowed for the definition of a blueprint that was applicable to all sales organizations within each brand. The headless approach gives flexibility in integrating 3rd party services like CMS, PIM and CPQ services.

Phase 3: Training and onboarding

In order to ensure that local organizations embrace and use the platform to its full potential, we created a program to train the local sales organizations worldwide. The program doesn’t stop when training is completed. In collaboration with local organizations, we defined the best approach to onboard existing and new customers so that the old order portal could be decommissioned step-by-step.

We created a very clear governance structure to support the size of the project, as well as the many different business units, countries and brands involved. This allowed for input and feedback from all stakeholders, while enabling a steady rollout pace.

The joint Valtech and Atlas Copco teams successfully rolled out the new and improved ecommerce platform worldwide in 2022. The platform is used in 70 countries, using 16 languages and 80+ sales channels, supporting 5 brands in over 30 customer centers worldwide. 

The global rollout blueprint defined a continuous rollout stream that impacted the running business as little as possible. 

Atlas Copco and Valtech established an integrated customer experience for lead generation and sales activities, that has led to a higher adoption of digital commerce amongst existing clients. 

The success of the ecommerce implementation has been a driver for further innovation within the Atlas Copco organization. This has resulted in additional revenue-generating initiatives. Valtech is continuously determining the digital transformation roadmap for manufacturing brands and supporting Atlas Copco in making the right decisions to add value for their customers.