Emmer­son Pack­ag­ing has been man­u­fac­tur­ing flex­i­ble pack­ag­ing solu­tions (think shrink wraps, ​“boil-in-a-bag,” and dog food bags) for more than 60 years. The orga­ni­za­tion prides itself on giv­ing its cus­tomers the best pos­si­ble ser­vice and prod­ucts. One avenue it chose to pro­vide excel­lent ser­vice was a self-ser­vice B2B e‑commerce system.

But because the sys­tem wasn’t inte­grat­ed with Emmerson’s ERP, the only way to give cus­tomers vis­i­bil­i­ty into their inven­to­ry, pric­ing, invoic­es, and ship­ping was to build and main­tain numer­ous cus­tom reports. This house of cards final­ly col­lapsed when Emmer­son imple­ment­ed SAP in 2015. The e‑commerce sys­tem was still in place, but the con­nec­tion to the data was com­plete­ly bro­ken. The site was fail­ing Emmer­son and its cus­tomers by dis­play­ing sta­t­ic, incom­plete, and even inac­cu­rate data. Cus­tomers had lim­it­ed vis­i­bil­i­ty into info they need­ed to run their busi­ness, the data quick­ly became obso­lete, and they did not trust the data that the web pages pro­vid­ed. Now every­thing from order sta­tus (when will my order be made or shipped) to deliv­ery dates, invoice infor­ma­tion, and inven­to­ry vis­i­bil­i­ty had to go to cus­tomer ser­vice. So, Emmer­son dou­bled its cus­tomer ser­vice depart­ment to han­dle the demand. But, it lost scal­a­bil­i­ty. It was crit­i­cal to find a long-term solution. 

Lis­ten as Emmer­son Pack­ag­ing CFO Stephen Slauen­white and Sam Bay­er, CEO at Core­vist, dis­cuss Emmerson’s strug­gles to present its cus­tomers with indi­vid­u­al­ized order and invoice infor­ma­tion from its SAP ERP, plans for a phased roll­out of a new SAP-inte­grat­ed e‑commerce solu­tion, and the dra­mat­ic results they’ve already seen.