When rethink­ing its dig­i­tal com­merce land­scape a few years back, Essi­ty — a glob­al leader in hygiene and health with $12B in annu­al rev­enue and oper­a­tions in 150 coun­tries — set a clear goal: to over­come the organization’s his­tor­i­cal frag­men­ta­tion and deliv­er a stronger, more uni­fied cus­tomer expe­ri­ence by build­ing a sin­gle plat­form with SAP Com­merce Cloud.

The com­pa­ny is well on its way to achiev­ing this goal: not by fol­low­ing the sta­tus quo, but by tak­ing strate­gic risks and mak­ing bold choices.

The team lead­ing the CX project was formed out of Essity’s glob­al dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion pro­gram, which involved migrat­ing from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA — an ongo­ing over­haul that start­ed in Europe and will con­tin­ue in the Unit­ed States. ​“We have mul­ti­ple ERPs that are being con­sol­i­dat­ed as part of that pro­gram,” explained Daniele Tedesco, eCom­merce Glob­al Process Own­er at Essi­ty. ​“Why not add busi­ness val­ue onto that by over­haul­ing the com­merce and the service?”

Start­ing from the ground up

For years, Essi­ty had been oper­at­ing sep­a­rate B2B and B2C e‑commerce solu­tions, each devel­oped in response to dif­fer­ent busi­ness needs — some exac­er­bat­ed by the pan­dem­ic, oth­ers by evolv­ing cus­tomer expec­ta­tions. This patch­work approach led to a scat­tered tech­nol­o­gy land­scape, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to scale, inno­vate, or deliv­er a seam­less cus­tomer experience.

To address this, Essi­ty decid­ed to rethink its approach from the ground up. The team start­ed with an agile mind­set, aim­ing to build reusable, scal­able tem­plates that could serve both B2C and B2B mod­els. The vision was to cre­ate a flex­i­ble foun­da­tion that could adapt to dif­fer­ent busi­ness needs while main­tain­ing con­sis­ten­cy and effi­cien­cy. The result? Two dis­tinct tem­plates: one for B2C and one for B2B.

The company’s strat­e­gy now rests on three pillars:

• Stream­line process­es through an inte­grat­ed, future-proof solution.
• Speed up go-to-mar­ket with a shared plat­form and code base.
• Deliv­er seam­less cus­tomer expe­ri­ences across Essity’s brands and channels.

A dual-track approach

Build­ing Essity’s new com­merce plat­form in par­al­lel with — and ahead of — the SAP S/4HANA ERP roll­out proved to be a strate­gic advan­tage for Essi­ty. Rather than wait­ing for the ERP trans­for­ma­tion to reach every mar­ket, the team lis­tened to urgent busi­ness needs — espe­cial­ly in the U.S. — and accel­er­at­ed the launch of mod­ern com­merce solu­tions through which they could most effi­cient­ly deliv­er val­ue to the busi­ness. ​“If we had fol­lowed the orig­i­nal pro­gram, rolling out where S/4 was, we wouldn’t have been able to deliv­er the busi­ness val­ue in such a time­ly man­ner,” said Kiet Nhu, IT Man­ag­er at Essity.

With strong lead­er­ship sup­port, Essity’s com­merce plat­form roll­out was able to move faster than the ERP pro­gram in key areas, deliv­er­ing incre­men­tal wins and a mod­ern cus­tomer expe­ri­ence with­out rein­vest­ing in out­dat­ed lega­cy sys­tems. By set­ting clear thresh­olds for when to launch and ensur­ing that new solu­tions could be inte­grat­ed with the ERP when it was imple­ment­ed, Essi­ty bal­anced speed with long-term sus­tain­abil­i­ty. Ulti­mate­ly, this approach allowed the busi­ness to ben­e­fit from a uni­fied, cus­tomer-cen­tric front end much soon­er, while still align­ing with the broad­er trans­for­ma­tion roadmap.

Mod­ern CX for both B2C and B2B

Essity’s B2C plat­form is now well-estab­lished and rapid­ly expand­ing, with sev­en mar­kets live since the first launch in the Nordics region in 2021. The company’s strat­e­gy cen­ters on reusable, scal­able tem­plates that can be quick­ly deployed across mar­kets, enabling aggres­sive growth. One exam­ple of this strat­e­gy in action came through the TENA brand; with its plat­form in place, Essi­ty was able to start oper­at­ing direct-to-con­sumer web­shops for TENA incon­ti­nence products.

This strate­gic evo­lu­tion hon­ors the TENA brand’s promise of dis­cre­tion, offer­ing reli­able inte­gra­tions with logis­tics and pay­ments, real-time ship­ping updates, and a fric­tion­less user expe­ri­ence. Impor­tant­ly, the new sys­tem also accel­er­ates roll­outs, reduc­ing time­lines from 6 – 9 months down to just 4 – 8 weeks.

Essi­ty launched its new B2B plat­form in the Unit­ed States in April 2024 to sup­port two busi­ness units. Both run on the same com­merce engine and sub­scrip­tion mod­el, demon­strat­ing how a uni­fied plat­form can flex­i­bly sup­port very dif­fer­ent busi­ness requirements.

The new plat­form inte­grates seam­less­ly with SAP’s ecosys­tem — includ­ing S/4HANA, SAP Cus­tomer Data Cloud (CDC), SAP Cloud Plat­form Inte­gra­tion (CPI), SAP Ser­vice Cloud, SAP Prod­uct Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment (PIM), and oth­ers. This inte­gra­tion enables stream­lined order cap­ture, real-time track­ing, secure pay­ment, and GDPR-com­pli­ant data protection. 

Essity’s health and med­ical B2B plat­form also trans­formed its pre­vi­ous­ly basic order­ing sys­tem. ​“What we had in the U.S. was a basic expe­ri­ence where a cus­tomer enters prod­uct IDs,” explained Tedesco. ​“The [prod­uct detail pages] PDPs lacked qual­i­ty JPEGs and enriched prod­uct con­tent. It was built for purpose.”

Essity’s e‑commerce team was press­ing for more than a sys­tem that’s ​“just there for pur­pose,” Nhu added. ​“But our busi­ness under­stands that mod­ern­iza­tion and user expe­ri­ence is key. That’s why we made a change.”

The new e‑commerce expe­ri­ence, which Essi­ty cre­at­ed with a full-stack solu­tion using the Spar­ta­cus Angu­lar-based JavaScript store­front for SAP Com­merce Cloud, offers visu­al­ly appeal­ing prod­uct pages, intu­itive nav­i­ga­tion, and advanced order­ing fea­tures tai­lored for busi­ness users, such as quick line-item addi­tions, easy reorder­ing, and bulk Excel uploads. This blend of B2C-style design with robust B2B func­tion­al­i­ty stream­lines the pur­chas­ing process and bet­ter meets the needs of phar­ma­cies that order prod­ucts like socks, gar­ments, and wound care items, which are then shipped direct­ly to patients. 

Just eight months after launch, in Decem­ber 2024, the com­pa­ny achieved 10,000 orders in one month — the high­est in the site’s 10-year his­to­ry. By Feb­ru­ary 2025, approx­i­mate­ly 50% of all orders were dig­i­tal­ly gen­er­at­ed. By replac­ing a basic, out­dat­ed sys­tem, cus­tomers have access to a B2C-style inter­face with rich graph­ics, detailed prod­uct pages, and enhanced search capa­bil­i­ties. Place orders and reorders is quick and easy, check­out is stream­lined, and they can do bulk uploads for mass orders — mak­ing the entire process faster, more intu­itive, and bet­ter suit­ed to the needs of busi­ness customers.

For its pro­fes­sion­al hygiene busi­ness, Essi­ty also adopt­ed a head­less archi­tec­ture, opti­mized for large truck­load orders. While shar­ing the same back­end as health and med­ical, this archi­tec­ture serves very dif­fer­ent order­ing pat­terns. The head­less approach allows a com­mon team to main­tain the robust back­end capa­bil­i­ties need­ed for large-scale B2B oper­a­tions while pro­vid­ing flex­i­bil­i­ty to meet the spe­cif­ic require­ments for hygiene customers.

Look­ing ahead, Essity’s next plans to expand its omnichan­nel foun­da­tion, use AI to boost pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, improve logis­tics, and scale to more mar­kets. The com­pa­ny plans to be live in 25 mar­kets (13 B2C and 12 B2B) by mid 2026.

Pre­req­ui­sites and recommendations

In reflect­ing on their suc­cess, Essi­ty lead­ers empha­sized the impor­tance of hav­ing a well-aligned tech stack before start­ing any major e‑commerce ini­tia­tive. Accord­ing to Tedesco, hav­ing foun­da­tion­al sys­tems in place — such as PIM and Dig­i­tal Asset Man­age­ment (DAM) — was cru­cial for suc­cess. Teams that lacked these ele­ments often strug­gled, espe­cial­ly when forced to con­vert from paper cat­a­logs or build dig­i­tal sys­tems mid-project.

Tedesco and Nhu also not­ed sev­er­al orga­ni­za­tion­al strate­gies that have been key to their over­all suc­cess. Secur­ing exec­u­tive buy-in ear­ly and main­tain­ing it through­out each project was essen­tial, as was struc­tur­ing ini­tia­tives as cap­i­tal invest­ments to gain stake­hold­er sup­port. Their recommendations:

• Cre­ate a glob­al lead­er­ship board for strate­gic deci­sions and bud­get approvals.
• Treat the e‑commerce plat­form as an asset, not just an expense.
• Deliv­er incre­men­tal wins by tar­get­ing areas of high­est busi­ness val­ue, even if that means mov­ing ahead of larg­er-scale projects, such as ERP rollouts.
• Main­tain a six-month thresh­old to avoid invest­ing in lega­cy sys­tems close to ERP go-live.
• Focus on change man­age­ment by restruc­tur­ing teams around the cus­tomer jour­ney, updat­ing KPIs, and help­ing busi­ness units under­stand the val­ue of mod­ern cus­tomer experience.

Essity’s e‑commerce trans­for­ma­tion has ulti­mate­ly been about meet­ing cus­tomers where they are. Accord­ing to Tedesco, ​“We want­ed to have the under­stand­ing and knowl­edge of what a mod­ern cus­tomer expe­ri­ence looks like. We know pro­fes­sion­al buy­ers have expec­ta­tions. We’re all buy­ing stuff on Ama­zon. That’s why we want­ed to estab­lish the B2C foun­da­tion first, then shift to build­ing it for B2B.”