Axalta is a leading global company specialising exclusively in coatings, coating technologies and application systems. Coatings applications range from OEM and refinish coatings for cars and commercial vehicles to applications for electric motors, wood, industrial objects, buildings and pipelines. The company is active in 130 countries and can look back on over 150 years of experience in the field of coatings.
Previously, over 95% of customer orders were handled by telephone and personal contact via the sales force and call centre. There were established in-house structures (data, processes, people) and little integration of the individual components. The existing structures posed huge challenges in this project for the digitalisation of sales processes at the multibrand, multichannel and multibusiness levels. Axalta also set out to be an early adopter of IoT and Industry 4.0 while maintaining a strong customer focus.
As many specialist paint shops are facing a generational change, with younger, tech-savvy people taking over the business, Axalta also had an urgent need to offer its customers digital solutions. The next generation also expects highly efficient ordering processes and mobile solutions in the B2B business.
For the first time, a fully integrated customer journey was to be achieved by seamlessly integrating the Magento catalogues and shops into the Axalta system landscape (e.g. into the Adobe CMS). The overnight delivery of repeat orders to the paint shops required by the market called for customised integration into Axalta's SAP environment.
Axalta decided to introduce a centralised PIM as the basis for the e-commerce processes for all brands and all markets. In addition to numerous online catalogues without ordering functions, over 30 online shops were implemented for the five Axalta brands based on the Magento shop system. A Corevist solution ensured integration into SAP and thus the display of real-time availability, customised prices and track & trace of orders.
Axalta's own SSO was integrated to give the customer access to the world of Axalta tools with a single login. This gave all customers access to their current orders and order history. All shops in all markets were also made available as native apps (Android and iOS) to enable the ordering function to be used from any location in the paint shops.
Both the development and the project management followed an agile approach. Scrum was used in the development team.
| Availability and customised prices in real time for the customer | ||
| Easy maintenance and deployment - very efficient and cost-effective for Axalta thanks to a common code base for all brands and stores | ||
| Permanently up-to-date product ranges in all shops: all shop-relevant product data and assets summarised in one place |
Axalta now has a completely new infrastructure that can be expanded to include new brands and markets almost at will. Online sales have risen steadily since the system was introduced. Two central platforms (SAP and Magento) are now displayed in one front end. This combination is mapped in a scalable cloud solution that can be continuously expanded. Paint and powder customers have access to product catalogues and a powerful ordering tool with order tracking as well as a comprehensive role and authorisation scheme for order processing. The existing ordering and approval process in the paint shops is thus taken into account.
The lessons learnt from the project are manifold. Axalta has been gathering e-commerce experience in a wide variety of markets for several years now and is constantly adapting its solution to market requirements. For the project team, it was particularly important to realise that digital transformation must always begin within the company. For Netresearch, this project also proved to be a use case for implementing a multistore environment with the blugento shop factory.
