E-commerce: Miko prioritises integration over best-of-breed
Coffee business Miko has a nice little extra in store for B2B customers. Through coffee@home, employees can purchase coffee with a helpful little discount.
Coffee business Miko has a nice little extra in store for B2B customers. Through coffee@home, employees can purchase coffee with a helpful little discount. To support this offer, Miko has set up a business-to-homeworker environment - in short, B2H - within the existing e-commerce platform. Do more orders mean more work for warehouse workers and the back office? Hardly. Thanks to the integration with the ERP system.
Miko is a familiar household name. For decades, Miko has supplied freshly roasted coffee, espresso machines and coffee machines to businesses, catering and government departments. And not just here, but in large parts of Europe as well, and even worldwide. Until the pandemic caused a shockwave that is. Then, people started to drink coffee at home, not at work.
Miko is a familiar household name. For decades, Miko has supplied freshly roasted coffee, espresso machines and coffee machines to businesses, catering and government departments. And not just here, but in large parts of Europe as well, and even worldwide. Until the pandemic caused a shockwave that is. Then, people started to drink coffee at home, not at work.
Integration or best-of-breed?
This shift forced Miko to think strategically – how could it reach to people now working from home? ‘We knew our customers, but not their employees,’ explains CIO Herman Braeken. ‘We decided to implement a B2B-to-consumer model, with a heavy focus on the customer experience.’
Miko uses SAP. It was already using the SAP Commerce platform for its B2B customers. Nevertheless, for the new strategy, it also examined other leading platforms and best-of-breed solutions. The handy integration with SAP, along with cost efficiency, made Miko opt for SAP Commerce again. A few months after the first lockdown, Miko launched coffee@home for the Belgian market.
‘SAP is our master,’ explains Herman. ‘All customer, product, price and price agreement data are stored in SAP. If we change a product or price - for one customer or for all of them - then it is immediately visible in all of our webshops.’
All-rounder
With its comprehensive integration with the backend, additional B2B orders mean virtually no added work for operators. ‘The coffee@home orders get a check mark and follow the B2B business process,’ adds Herman. ‘In SAP, we create tracking orders and labels. The picker prepares the orders with a check mark for GLS, our transport partner. The employee, working from home, receives an e-mail automatically, containing the tracking information. GLS delivers the packages to their home.’
Miko now has eight B2B webshops in six countries, five languages and four currencies. It also has a B2C environment and a B2H environment. Each country has its own look and feel, different prices and different promotions. Business-to-homeworker customers decide themselves which products are available for their employees to purchase. An increasing number of customers are starting to prefer an Open Catalogue Interface. For Miko, this makes little difference, as SAP Commerce makes everything possible. All the webshops today are high performing, running on a single SAP Commerce server.
All-rounder
With its comprehensive integration with the backend, additional B2B orders mean virtually no added work for operators. ‘The coffee@home orders get a check mark and follow the B2B business process,’ adds Herman. ‘In SAP, we create tracking orders and labels. The picker prepares the orders with a check mark for GLS, our transport partner. The employee, working from home, receives an e-mail automatically, containing the tracking information. GLS delivers the packages to their home.’
Miko now has eight B2B webshops in six countries, five languages and four currencies. It also has a B2C environment and a B2H environment. Each country has its own look and feel, different prices and different promotions. Business-to-homeworker customers decide themselves which products are available for their employees to purchase. An increasing number of customers are starting to prefer an Open Catalogue Interface. For Miko, this makes little difference, as SAP Commerce makes everything possible. All the webshops today are high performing, running on a single SAP Commerce server.
Pragmatic
Herman Braeken contacted SAP partner TheValueChain to assist with the implementation. ‘You don’t need a massive team to set up the platform,’ adds Herman. ‘That’s just as well, because we always think twice at least before spending money. We need people who can think collaboratively, with expertise and a pragmatic approach. That’s something TheValueChain always does well. That they are part of the Gumption Group is an added bonus. If you need software testers, designers, security specialists or BI geeks for your project as well, they have all that knowledge under one roof.’