One of the world’s largest glob­al med­ical tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies with over 70,000 employ­ees, Bec­ton, Dick­in­son and Com­pa­ny (BD) spe­cial­izes in man­u­fac­tur­ing and sell­ing med­ical devices and instru­ment sys­tems that help advance clin­i­cal ther­a­py for patients and clin­i­cal process­es for health­care providers.

Ded­i­cat­ed to improv­ing out­comes for patients by accel­er­at­ing the process of med­ical dis­cov­ery, diag­nos­tics, and deliv­ery of care, BD adheres to a strict stan­dard of excel­lence in devel­op­ing its tech­nol­o­gy, ser­vices, and solu­tions, a stan­dard that extends to its intel­li­gent cus­tomer experience.

“In today’s world, cus­tomers’ expec­ta­tions are exceed­ing­ly high, and every indus­try is try­ing to keep up with them,” said Venkat Shan, Direc­tor of Plat­forms Solu­tions & Ser­vices Enter­prise Archi­tec­ture & Design Gov­er­nance Tech­nol­o­gy & Glob­al Ser­vices at Bec­ton Dick­in­son & Com­pa­ny. In his role, Shan is respon­si­ble for the enter­prise roadmap, archi­tec­ture, design, and gov­er­nance for glob­al com­mer­cial and dig­i­tal marketing.

With­in BD’s com­mit­ment to cus­tomer-cen­tric ser­vice, Shan and his team recent­ly worked to exe­cute a cus­tomer-cen­tric trans­for­ma­tion of BD’s e‑commerce capa­bil­i­ties, sim­pli­fy­ing the cus­tomer jour­ney from aware­ness to pur­chase to repur­chase with­in online chan­nels. These efforts have turned dig­i­tal com­merce into a prof­it dri­ver at BD, includ­ing by using cus­tomer data insights to dri­ve mar­ket­ing efforts and deliv­er bot­tom-line growth. 

As Shan recent­ly explained while dis­cussing BD’s e‑commerce jour­ney at SAP Sap­phire & ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence, inte­grat­ing dig­i­tal solu­tions with the company’s exist­ing mod­els, includ­ing SAP Com­merce Cloud, which Shan calls ​“our moth­er­ship and the e‑commerce engine,” result­ed in sim­pli­fied process­es, sig­nif­i­cant time sav­ings, and increased revenue.

Busi­ness Dri­vers for BD’s E‑Commerce Transformation

B2B e‑commerce, short for busi­ness-to-busi­ness elec­tron­ic com­merce, is on the rise, with approx­i­mate­ly half of all the world’s com­pa­nies pur­chas­ing prod­ucts online through self-ser­vice trans­ac­tions, includ­ing via ven­dor or part­ner web­sites and online mar­ket­places.

“Cus­tomer behav­ior is chang­ing, and the com­pe­ti­tion is respond­ing,” said Shan. ​“We need­ed to tap into that as an indus­try, as a busi­ness, as a life sci­ence cus­tomer, to be able to lever­age that cus­tomer chan­nel, which allows cus­tomers to have indi­vid­ual pur­chas­ing pow­er and gain vis­i­bil­i­ty as to where their pur­chas­es are in terms of delivery.”

For B2B e‑commerce oper­a­tions to suc­ceed, a com­pet­i­tive set of prod­ucts and SKUs (stock-keep­ing units) to sell them are non-nego­tiable; but ​“the oth­er aspect of it is how you take it to the cus­tomer,” Shan explained.

To suc­ceed in this respect, Shan need­ed to remain knowl­edge­able about the jour­ney of Bec­ton Dickinson’s cus­tomers and how their busi­ness­es nav­i­gate the process of pur­chas­ing prod­ucts from his com­pa­ny. For the pre-pur­chase phase, he looked at the cus­tomer jour­ney from a tech­nol­o­gy and mar­ket­ing stack along four dif­fer­ent fronts.

“Before cus­tomers think about pur­chas­ing, they want aware­ness,” he said. ​“They want to be able to do research into tech­ni­cal prod­ucts. They want per­son­al­iza­tion for indi­vid­ual cus­tomers. And then they want some type of inter­ac­tion if they need fur­ther guid­ance or support.” 

To dri­ve that com­bi­na­tion of aware­ness, research, per­son­al­iza­tion, and inter­ac­tion, Shan said that mar­ket­ing is essen­tial to giv­ing cus­tomers pur­chas­ing pow­er. Once cus­tomers had reached that point, BD need­ed to pro­vide self-ser­vice capa­bil­i­ties and lever­age their data to move them toward oth­er prod­ucts and SKUs, rel­e­vant to their indus­try or mar­ket, avail­able in BD’s portfolio.

“We want­ed to be able to dif­fer­en­ti­ate through unique cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, cre­ate busi­ness val­ue, and estab­lish mar­ket-dri­ven data for our data-dri­ven mar­ket­ing staff,” he explained. ​“B2B e‑commerce helped us improve our cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and improve our rev­enue as anoth­er medi­um and chan­nel. Our indus­try is very com­pet­i­tive; if you’re not part of that com­pe­ti­tion, you’re going to lose the mar­ket share.”

Inside Project Galaxy

BD has been equipped with e‑commerce capa­bil­i­ties in cer­tain busi­ness units and regions as far back as 2005, and those capa­bil­i­ties became more holis­tic in 2010 with SAP Web Chan­nel. In 2014, when BD moved into the on-premis­es ver­sion of SAP Hybris, a ful­ly func­tion­al enter­prise omnichan­nel com­merce soft­ware, the com­pa­ny still felt that the plat­form catered most to the buy­ing process but did not suf­fi­cient­ly empha­size the pre-pur­chase and post-pur­chase capa­bil­i­ties need­ed to make BD’s cus­tomer expe­ri­ence tru­ly intelligent. 

And so Shan and his team under­took Project Galaxy, tak­ing a green­field approach to cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and imple­ment­ing the sec­ond ver­sion of SAP Com­merce Cloud (CCv2), a more com­pre­hen­sive com­merce solu­tion that sup­port­ed back-office order man­age­ment and advanced end-user shop­ping expe­ri­ences. A pub­lic cloud offer­ing on Microsoft Azure that fea­tured increased self-ser­vice for oper­a­tional tasks via a cloud por­tal, CCv2 was built on top of SAP Hybris; after ini­tial­ly imple­ment­ing CCv2 1905 with a head­less archi­tec­ture, sep­a­rat­ing user inter­face from appli­ca­tion log­ic, BD last year upgrad­ed to the lat­est version. 

Addi­tion­al­ly, the SAP Com­merce Cloud Accel­er­a­tor — a ready-to-use web imple­men­ta­tion tem­plate that allowed the com­pa­ny to jump­start its imple­men­ta­tion and build its e‑commerce solu­tion — was instru­men­tal from a tech­ni­cal per­spec­tive. ​“It was a robust foun­da­tion for us to take and expand,” he said. ​“This tech­nol­o­gy was an impor­tant enabler for us.”

A Phased Approach

Com­plet­ing this trans­for­ma­tion required col­lab­o­ra­tion between busi­ness, tech­nol­o­gy, and mar­ket­ing groups at BD, as well as a phased approach. First, BD focused on build­ing a web­site capa­ble of dynam­i­cal­ly pulling cus­tomer data to dri­ve an intel­li­gent cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, then build­ing out a prod­uct cat­a­log, mar­ket­ing attrib­ut­es, and mar­ket­ing automa­tion, seg­men­ta­tion, and campaigns.

“We had dif­fer­ent tools and tech­nolo­gies lay­ered to achieve all this, many of them SAP prod­ucts, as well as Adobe suites,” said Shan. ​“We took it to the next lev­el, though we still have capa­bil­i­ties we want to deliv­er with­in the next sev­en years.” 

The sec­ond phase involved incor­po­rat­ing cus­tomer self-ser­vice capa­bil­i­ties, equip­ping them to pur­chase prod­ucts and per­son­al­iz­ing the expe­ri­ence with spe­cif­ic offers based on pre­vi­ous pur­chas­es. One par­tic­u­lar ​“game-chang­er,” accord­ing to Shan, was inte­grat­ed elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion between BD’s pro­cure­ment sys­tems and its sup­pli­ers via a ​“pun­chout process” that allowed buy­ers to access sup­pli­ers’ online stores through their e‑procurement sys­tem or ERP sys­tem with­out leav­ing their inter­nal systems. 

“We have embed­ded our e‑commerce por­tal through lay­ers to sup­pli­ers,” he explained. ​“If a hos­pi­tal wants to go to the web­site and buy from pre­ferred sup­pli­ers, the BD logo will be acces­si­ble to them, because we’ve engaged in pre-pur­chase agree­ments and set it up so that they can click on our logo, it takes them to the supplier’s site, with our e‑commerce site built into it. They request all the prod­ucts, we give them the price, it goes into their pro­cure­ment sys­tem, and because it’s inter­nal to the cus­tomer, they can approve it very quick­ly with­out pur­chase-order process­es. They can just place the order.”

This pun­chout process also makes it eas­i­er for BD to ful­fill the orders and pro­vides vis­i­bil­i­ty to the com­pa­ny in onboard­ing new cus­tomers who are not only buy­ing through reg­u­lar e‑commerce chan­nels but also through their sup­pli­er portals.

Giv­en the fre­quen­cy of acqui­si­tions at BD over the last few years, it was impor­tant for the com­pa­ny to build a scal­able e‑commerce plat­form that could weath­er the com­plex­i­ty of facil­i­tat­ing order-to-cash logis­tics process­es through one ERP sys­tem and sell­ing prod­ucts through anoth­er ERP until those sys­tems could be merged. 

“We made a very scal­able, gener­ic approach through API calls, which lay­ered our capa­bil­i­ty,” Shan said. ​“Any time a new acqui­si­tion hap­pens, and they’re ready to start sell­ing, we need to do a lit­tle bit of inte­gra­tion work, and then they can get out there sell­ing their prod­ucts through our channels.”

BD imple­ment­ed SAP Com­merce Cloud with a head­less archi­tec­ture, enabling indi­vid­ual busi­ness­es to man­age their con­tent and data, while Shan’s team man­ages the e‑commerce engine and ensures its func­tion­al­i­ty. ​“We have cre­at­ed a jig­saw puz­zle in such a way that every lay­er can be scal­able at any point in time, which was one of our key suc­cess fac­tors,” he said.

How SAP Com­merce Cloud ​‘Ele­vat­ed the Experience’

From a con­tent per­spec­tive, Shan said that indi­vid­ual busi­ness units and the mar­ket­ing team at BD were invalu­able in shar­ing their per­spec­tive on what cus­tomers need­ed and were look­ing for. 

“We his­tor­i­cal­ly looked at giv­ing peo­ple the capa­bil­i­ty to buy the prod­ucts that we sell, but we didn’t look at the aware­ness, research, and mar­ket­ing aspects of it,” Shan said. ​“I’d say that our trans­for­ma­tion has not been a tech­nol­o­gy shift so much as a shift in how we sell and push our prod­ucts from a mar­ket­ing perspective.”

It’s about more than cre­at­ing a web­site, he said: ​“E‑commerce is an enabler, but the most impor­tant aspect of that enabler is how peo­ple per­ceive infor­ma­tion, how they take that and move forward.” 

For most of BD’s cus­tomers, includ­ing tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies, quick nav­i­ga­tion to the right prod­ucts was more impor­tant than pro­vid­ing them with the abil­i­ty to browse a prod­uct cat­a­log. In the past, BD had too many micro-sites and web­sites hous­ing its con­tent, which made it more dif­fi­cult for cus­tomers to nav­i­gate the platform.

“Too much infor­ma­tion over­load can take away the cus­tomer’s view­point,” he said. ​“You have to have enough for them to absorb it, but if they want more, they have to be able to drill down. Mes­sag­ing is impor­tant. Infor­ma­tion over­load is dan­ger­ous. We had to bal­ance that out.” 

BD’s e‑commerce site is more intu­itive, sim­plis­tic, and easy-to-use than ever before, and the man­date that cus­tomers should be able to nav­i­gate it with­out any train­ing was cru­cial to the trans­for­ma­tion project. ​“We were able to do strong busi­ness val­ue cre­ation which increased our cus­tomer loy­al­ty and increased rev­enue, data-dri­ven mar­ket­ing increased traf­fic, and the dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed expe­ri­ence we pro­vid­ed to our cus­tomers has allowed them to go through the pro­cure­ment process on their web­sites, seam­less­ly so,” Shan said. In sum­ma­ry, ​“it ele­vat­ed the experience.”

Change Man­age­ment and Plan­ning at BD

Reflect­ing on over­all take­aways from BD’s e‑commerce jour­ney, Shan called the project a ​“great suc­cess” pre­cise­ly because it was a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort involv­ing stake­hold­ers from var­i­ous parts of the busi­ness. Plan­ning, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and stake­hold­er man­age­ment were all essen­tial. ​“You can nev­er go wrong with more plan­ning; if you have the right plan and you have the right lead­ers to exe­cute it, you know your bat­tle is half-won,” Shan said.

“The oth­er, big­ger chal­lenge is always change man­age­ment, inter­nal­ly and exter­nal­ly,” he added. Ensur­ing all par­ties with­in his own orga­ni­za­tion were aligned through a steer­ing com­mit­tee and care­ful inter­nal mes­sag­ing made it more pos­si­ble to then engage sup­pli­ers and get them on board with the project. 

“If change is enabled from the inside, it becomes easy,” he said. ​“A well-thought-through, planned project and strong change man­age­ment through stake­hold­er engage­ment are the two major keys to success.”

For more cus­tomer sto­ries from SAP Sap­phire & ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence, be sure to sign up to receive the ASUG First Five week­ly newslet­ter.