Rockwool eCommerce platform: Rockcommerce

Baggrund

ROCKWOOL was founded more than a eighty years ago in the Greater Copenhagen area to produce stone wool, enriching modern living for consumers and businesses on a global level.
eCommerce platforms may be old news for many companies, but not for the Building Material industry, which is historically conservative, specifically regarding trade processes. Companies operating in this industry traditionally place their orders through fax or by calling the customer service department. However, B2B customers are increasingly starting to expect the same service agility and omnichannel possibilities that B2C customers enjoy, and which can be experienced through eCommerce platforms. ROCKWOOL therefore saw an opportunity to be the digital frontrunners and make a difference for their customers by introducing ROCKCOMMERCE, one of the best operational eCommerce platform in the Building Material industry.
In recent years, ROCKWOOL has accelerated the implementation of digital Marketing and Sales tools throughout the organisation that would enable a greater process standardisation, with tools such as Marketing Automation, PIM, CRM, EDI, CPQ & Track & Trace. Historically, ROCKWOOL customers placed their orders through the customer service department, who was responsible for the products’ entire journey from quotation to delivery, while ensuring a superior service and experience.
But with the right tools in place and ready to be leveraged, ROCKWOOL designed the roadmap to create ROCKCOMMERCE, which had to fulfil the following three goals:
1) Leverage recently implemented digital marketing and sales tools to benefit ROCKWOOL customers
2) Give customers an eCommerce platform with a B2C look, feel and speed, and which would be mobile-friendly
3) Sustain the same superior quality service that customer have come to expect from ROCKWOOL.

ROCKWOOL worked with two external partners to bring ROCKCOMMERCE to life:
KPMG in Denmark conducted interviews with customers to gather valuable qualitative data and identified the three key e-commerce feature areas to prioritise, namely:

1) Improve Customer Loyalty
2) Improve Sales
3) Customer Service capacity increase (cost saving)

VERTIC was appointed with the task of designing ROCKCOMMERCE with these three goals:
1) Align ROCKCOMMERCE’s corporate website design language with ROCKWOOL’s
2) Translate feature requirements into ascetic elements that would neither slow performance nor confuse the customer in regards to the purpose of a certain component.
3) Design the platform to convey a best-in-class look, feel and speed.

Løsning

Prior to the Danish implementation, ROCKWOOL chose the French market as a pilot to build and implement ROCKCOMMERCE using an agile development framework. It took four months and six sprints to create an available User Acceptance Testing (UAT) environment. The production version was available the following month.
KPMG facilitated the collaboration between ROCKWOOL’s major and most relevant subsidiaries, addressing all relevant business processes while integrating them into key applications such as ERP, PIM, CRM, CPQ and T&T.
The development team focused on mapping out the French subsidiary’s relevant business process needs and associated features in order to future proof ROCKCOMMERCE.
64 features were identified by customers and further enhanced by ROCKWOOL workshop participants, KPMG and Vertic, with the main ones being:
- Unlocking the possibility to buy associated ROCKWOOL brands on the platform (ROCKFON, ROCKPANEL), as these are usually dealt with in separate sales channels.
- Allowing cross-branch purchasing (ERP customer hierarchy).
- Enabling the quote request functionality (CPQ integration). Currently, most project sales are based on the project’s specific pricing, which requires a formal quote to be submitted and approved via ROCKWOOL’s internal CPQ system.
- Searching products based on a ‘master’ product, where one product is displayed with selection panes instead of 20 similar products.
- Displaying the order history, irrespective of how orders were previously placed (integrated into SAP ERP)
- Allowing customer to modify all orders, regardless of how they were placed.
- Integrating the Track & Trace functionality.

For these features to become operational, ROCKWOOL’s digital integration team worked with KPMG to implement both the best-practice processes through ROCKWOOL’s integration platform, Informatica, and the real-time services and API’s to the CRM, Track & Trace, ERP and PIM solutions. To add to the complexity of this project, all the features were made from scratch. In the final stages of the development process, a customer panel was created to test the platform and ensure met the specific customer procurement process’ expectations and needs.
As a result, ROCKCOMMERCE now offers a real-time self-service platform where customers have access to invoices, customer specific pricing, contracts, credit-limit, claims and complaints, order history and track & trace information. In addition, a live chat function was introduced, which further limits the manual engagement demanded by ROCKWOOL’s customer service team.