How Vink VTS revolutionised their B2B plastics business.
Vink VTS, one of Europe’s largest plastics suppliers, built a new Adobe Commerce solution that allows B2B customers to see all their deliveries, orders and invoices online, in real time.
-75%
Internal sales calls received
Products:
Objectives
Upgrade e-commerce operations to become more agile
Integrate with EU-standard ERP system
Deliver a centralised e-commerce solution with ability to customise locally
Results
+160% webshop orders
-75% internal sales calls received
<2 second load time
The European plastics giant needed help with B2B sales
The plastics company Vink VTS sources and delivers a wide range of plastic materials from the best suppliers in the world, to create illuminated advertising, self-adhesive signage, full-colour images, plastic car wraps and even wraps for entire buildings. The company is part of Vink Holdings, a federation of more than 100 independent businesses in 16 European countries, established in 1954. Vink Holdings has many brick-and-mortar plug sockets and supplies more than 120,000 customers from industries including graphics and signage, construction, chemical and storage, manufacturing, automotive, public transport and medicine.
In 2016 Vink Holdings made the strategic decision to standardise their European e-commerce operations on Magento Commerce 2 (now Adobe Commerce). At the same moment Vink VTS decided that their online operation needed re-working. Both Vink Holdings and Vink VTS e-commerce aligned on the idea of an ambitious pilot project, including an integration with their EU-standard ERP solution.
Vink VTS was moving from a tailor-made solution, which had become costly and ineffective. They needed to upgrade their e-commerce operations to become more agile.
Their business model is unique: Vink Holdings is a highly decentralised organisation, with scores of independent subsidiaries and business units operating throughout Europe and beyond. So, their new solution would need to be compatible with multi-domains and multi-shops. It would also need to manage the complex price structures of each individual company.
“Adobe Commerce, in collaboration with YouWe, helps us to achieve our goal to stay ahead and go beyond.”
Arthur van Koetsveld
European Head of eCommerce, Vink Holdings
Adobe Commerce made a complex B2B sales problem easy
Together with their solution partner, YouWe, Vink VTS became the first company within Vink Holdings to adopt Adobe Commerce. YouWe crafted a customised solution that augmented the core Adobe solution with YouWe’s unique B2B and ERP integration suites.
The Vink Holdings head office runs a central Microsoft Dynamics AXE ERP solution for the entire organisation. All other decisions are made locally due to different buyer personas and cultures. In this decentralised structure, every country, business unit and company can make its own choices regarding their e-commerce solution.
To fit their organisation, the new Adobe Commerce solution was designed to be run from a central repository by the Vink VTS corporate team, but also used and overwritten by local subsidiaries working with local partners. “The brilliant thing was that although a local partner can overwrite any single component or feature, it has not been overwritten due to its success,” says Arthur van Koetsveld, European Head of eCommerce for Vink Holding. “This made the choice for Adobe Commerce very easy.”
Due to the success of the first shop, Vink continued to easily add new shops in multiple countries and languages. Currently more than 10 subsidiaries are live on the platform.
Phenomenal results and a future-proof B2B sales solution
The new Vink VTS platform, with a full Microsoft Dynamics web-service based integration, went live in May of 2017 after a development period of eight months. For the first time since the company started, Vink VTS was able to take a digital order by e-commerce alone. “We get positive reactions,” says van Koetsveld. “The customers say the site works very well. We also see that the shop converts well and generates additional sales.”
The new solution allows customers to see all deliveries, orders and invoices online — and that’s all orders, not just online ones. They can also see the real-time delivery date of their order, price, handling and transport costs.
The increase of digital orders and reduction of costs were “enormous,” says van Koetsveld. In 2017, after a period of seven months, the new solution was generating 20% of the company’s total sales. Adobe Commerce allows Vink VTS to show real-time information on dynamic pages in under two seconds. With their B2B operations easily accessible online, Vink VTS reduced the load of calls to their internal sales team, while improving online sales and stock inventory turnover.
The success of the Vink VTS webshop was witnessed by other parts of the business, who are now choosing Adobe Commerce as their solution too. “The concept is futureproof,” says van Koetsveld. “The webshop has been built in a scalable way, so we can easily roll out the features and the template if other profit centres in any European country want a webshop.”
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