Don’t miss Bren­da King’s ses­sion at SAP Sap­phire & ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence (May 11 – 13, 2026, in Orlando). 

Evolv­ing its e‑commerce capa­bil­i­ties from a lega­cy plat­form to an indus­try-lead­ing parts shop­ping expe­ri­ence required a focused migra­tion ini­tia­tive; but for Daim­ler Truck North Amer­i­ca LLC, an auto­mo­tive indus­try man­u­fac­tur­er of com­mer­cial vehi­cles, dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion was a nec­es­sary step to mod­ern­ize out­dat­ed operations.

When­ev­er cus­tomers used Daim­ler’s lega­cy cus­tom parts order­ing tool, they had to pro­vide exact part num­bers in order to locate them in the sys­tem, which addi­tion­al­ly lacked capa­bil­i­ties for sup­port­ing images. There was also no way for the com­pa­ny to host sales or pro­mo­tions on this plat­form to incen­tivize addi­tion­al orders from customers. 

“It had out­lived its use­ful­ness, and we need­ed to be more cur­rent,” said Bren­da King, IT Man­ag­er, Dig­i­tal Com­merce at Daim­ler Truck North Amer­i­ca, a lead­ing man­u­fac­tur­er and the largest deal­er of Class 6, 7, and 8 vehi­cles (includ­ing Freight­lin­er Trucks, West­ern Star, Thomas Built Bus­es, and Detroit brands).

For vehi­cle main­te­nance, cus­tomers will pur­chase parts through Daim­ler; while its main busi­ness is focused on man­u­fac­tur­ing of vehi­cles, ​“there is a sig­nif­i­cant part of the busi­ness that is involved in after-sales, and that’s real­ly where our e‑commerce solu­tions come in,” King explained. 

To bring its e‑commerce plat­form into a mod­ern-day tech­nol­o­gy land­scape, bet­ter serve cus­tomers, and gen­er­ate new rev­enue, the Daim­ler team began migra­tion to SAP Com­merce on-premise in 2019, ful­ly rolling out its Excel­er­a­tor Parts plat­form to cus­tomers in 2020 and lat­er mov­ing to SAP Com­merce Cloud in 2024. 

Inside the Excel­er­a­tor Parts Platform 

Excel­er­a­tor is Daim­ler Truck North America’s e‑commerce plat­form for truck and bus parts, extend­ed cov­er­ages, and con­nec­tiv­i­ty ser­vices. Once SAP Com­merce Cloud’s built-in pro­mo­tions engine was in place, the Excel­er­a­tor Parts plat­form could expand to include the Daim­ler Inner Cir­cle Rewards pro­gram, adver­tis­ing pro­mo­tions and dis­counts only avail­able through the plat­form. King said this has gen­er­at­ed addi­tion­al sales that the com­pa­ny oth­er­wise wouldn’t have nec­es­sar­i­ly made. 

Daim­ler’s Fleet Pun­chout solu­tion is anoth­er suc­cesss sto­ry made pos­si­ble by the con­ver­sion to SAP Com­merce Cloud. Large fleets that use Daim­ler Truck prod­ucts include FedEx and Waste Man­age­ment; such cus­tomers can con­nect their pro­cure­ment sys­tems to Daimler’s, allow­ing their own repair shops to quick­ly find the nec­es­sary parts and auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­ate orders. 

While these fleets often also use parts that aren’t Daim­ler-spe­cif­ic, Excel­er­a­tor Parts also car­ries them, allow­ing for a cen­tral­ized loca­tion for order­ing both Daim­ler and non-Daim­ler parts. This fur­ther stream­lines the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and encour­ages more orders. ​“That has also real­ly boost­ed sales,” King said. 

Oth­er enhance­ments include a vehi­cle-based parts cat­a­log and more to come.

King said the migra­tion to the cloud took around 10 months, start­ing in 2023 and live by Jan­u­ary 2024. While oth­er SAP Com­merce Cloud cus­tomers have been able to com­plete their tran­si­tion in less time, DTNA’s spe­cif­ic parts cat­a­log — which includes the full struc­ture of each of their man­u­fac­tured vehi­cles — was stored in a cus­tom data­base, mak­ing the tran­si­tion more com­plex. A com­pa­ny with more stan­dard process­es is like­ly to go live soon­er, accord­ing to King. 

Over­com­ing Busi­ness Challenges

Although mov­ing to the cloud was a com­pli­cat­ed expe­ri­ence at first, King said, ​“we’re glad to be in the cloud now.” 

The busi­ness faced chal­lenges with this migra­tion to the cloud because devel­op­ment was lim­it­ed dur­ing that time. King high­light­ed that secu­ri­ty and main­te­nance sup­port avail­able through SAP’s cloud migra­tion ser­vices were immense­ly help­ful to Daim­ler, along­side improved autoscal­ing capa­bil­i­ties in the cloud (or the abil­i­ty of servers to han­dle spikes in web traffic). 

Daimler’s cus­tomers were also hes­i­tant to embrace the change at first. ​“Man­u­fac­tur­ing tends to be a bit old school, and many of our deal­ers weren’t sold on an online sys­tem. I think they feared that their cus­tomers wouldn’t talk to them any­more or that they would lose busi­ness,” she said. Daim­ler’s team rolled the plat­form out slow­ly, in a phased approach, to prove its capa­bil­i­ties to cus­tomers in a more incre­men­tal way. 

The result of these efforts include an aver­age 30,000 unique dai­ly users to the plat­form, as well as a 33% year-over-year increase in 2025 rev­enue, a record for the com­pa­ny. E‑commerce as a per­cent­age of Daimler’s rev­enue grew from 5% in 2020 to 19% in 2025. 

Crit­i­cal to DTNA’s Success

Before the migra­tion from lega­cy plat­form to SAP Com­merce Cloud, King worked on the ERP side of Daim­ler. When the deci­sion was made to make this tran­si­tion, Daim­ler stood up a whole new orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to e‑commerce, start­ing with King and one oth­er team mem­ber inter­nal­ly before the rest of the team was built from exter­nal resources and IT. ​“That was crit­i­cal for prepa­ra­tion,” King said. 

Because SAP Com­merce is not an out-of-the-box appli­ca­tion, Daim­ler also engaged SAP ser­vices in Mon­tréal to help with the migra­tion and build­ing a cus­tom solu­tion. The SAP Mon­tréal team helped in stand­ing up the min­i­mum viable prod­uct (MVP), while train­ing the Daim­ler team on how to use the new sys­tem. King said that her team is still work­ing with them and co-devel­op­ing in an ongo­ing capacity. 

“The Mon­tréal team loves the part­ner­ship they have with DTNA,” added Seema Kessel­ring, Glob­al VP of CX Prod­uct Strat­e­gy, SAP. 

King added that oth­er fac­tors crit­i­cal to Daimler’s suc­cess in this project includ­ed col­lab­o­ra­tion between IT, imple­men­ta­tion part­ners, and busi­ness col­leagues. ​“Suc­cess is much more like­ly if both the IT and busi­ness orga­ni­za­tion has a struc­tured dig­i­tal com­merce depart­ment. This is impor­tant for the ini­tial imple­men­ta­tion, ongo­ing oper­a­tions, and future enhance­ments,” King said.

What’s Next

Daim­ler Truck NA is next look­ing to devel­op addi­tion­al capa­bil­i­ties in its e‑commerce plat­form, includ­ing engine upgrade com­par­i­son tools that lever­age AI, a col­li­sion repair inte­gra­tion, and more part­ner inte­gra­tions. The plat­form is cur­rent­ly inte­grat­ed with its in-house ERP sys­tem, but the com­pa­ny plans to soon move to SAP S/4HANA, King said. 

King will speak at SAP Sap­phire & ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence about Daimler’s move to SAP Com­merce Cloud, and she’s eager to help exist­ing SAP Com­merce cus­tomers through chal­lenges they may be expe­ri­enc­ing, as well as to share Daimler’s busi­ness mod­el and plat­form capabilities.

King also hopes to learn from oth­ers: ​“One of my spe­cif­ic areas of inter­est is learn­ing about oth­er orga­ni­za­tions’ depart­ments that sup­port e‑commerce and how they are struc­tured.” Daim­ler has expe­ri­enced sig­nif­i­cant plat­form growth; with a full future roadmap, she looks to events like SAP Sap­phire & ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence to gain insights from oth­ers how to adjust orga­ni­za­tions to accom­mo­date such grow­ing scale.

Don’t miss out on the chance to hear King share Daim­ler Truck North America’s sto­ry. Reg­is­ter for SAP Sap­phire & ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence, tak­ing place in Orlan­do May 11 – 13, with ASUG Pre-Con­fer­ence Sem­i­nars on May 11.