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an automotive industry manufacturer of commercial vehicles, digital transformation was a necessary step to modernize outdated operations.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 2014, 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 Montreal to help with the migration and building a custom solution. The SAP Montreal 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 Montreal 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.