[Music] [Scott Rigby] All right, so welcome to today's B2B Commerce session. So today we're going to be talking about ABB, and we're going to be talking about their digital journey and so myself and Maurice, who'll introduce shortly, are going to be tag teaming through this presentation. So my name is Scott Rigby. I am the Principal Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Commerce focused on B2B, and I'm going to be hosting today's session. So welcome all. Hands up in the room, who went to the Adobe Commerce Roadmap session with Chanda? Good. Excellent. Hopefully, you're all excited about the new releases that we announce today and the new direction for the technology, and I'll talk a bit more about what that means in respect of our product direction later on the presentation today. So to start off, we're going to be talking about ABB's journey, right? So ABB is a multi-billion dollar conglomerate based out of Switzerland. They're focused on electronics and electronic manufacturing and electrification and Maurice is going to do a much better job than me, I'm sure, in explaining what they do and the types of products that they sell, but they're going to walk us through their journey as they expanded globally and talk about some of the wins that they had, some of the challenges they had, the journey that they're on, and the direction that they're going to. I'm going to follow that up. We're talking about just from Adobe Commerce perspective, what does our journey look like in respect of the technology, as well as some customer case studies. And then we're going to break it into a bit more of an informal session. We're going to have a Fireside Chat. I'm going to open up with some questions. We have some mics on the floor, and so I encourage you to come, ask myself or Maurice, more Maurice the challenging questions, so that we can all learn, right? We're all here to be able to learn today. So without further ado, I'm going to welcome up Maurice Bernards. So Maurice looks after the Global eCommerce for ABB and runs their Strategy & Adoption Lead, and like I mentioned, he's going to be talking about ABB's journey. So please join me in welcoming Maurice.
[Maurice Bernards] All right.
Thank you. That's the biggest my face has ever been on a screen, by the way. Thank you for that.
Yeah, thank you for joining us here, and thank you, Scott, for the introduction. It's a real pleasure to be here. So I'll be talking a bit about our journey as we went through at the beginning, introducing Adobe Commerce and where we are today and also what lies ahead of us.
And basically talking a little bit about, let's say, the good, and the bad, and also the ugly of a digital transformation. And so first, a few words on who are we, who is ABB, talking a bit about why and how we are doing this, and then afterwards also about what we've done and also what's coming, and then the juicy part, right? The mistakes we made and how you can avoid them.
So who are we? I represent ABB Motion. Maybe you've heard of it. In the US, we're known for the Baldor brand. So Baldor Motors, it's a huge, let's say, brand name in the US when it comes to electric motors. So Motion is basically 7 divisions, has about 22,000 employees worldwide, market size about $55 billion and orders of about 8 billion. This quick calculation gives you between 10, 15% market share, meaning that we are the market leader in motors and drives. So you see that there on the right. Basically, we sell two types of products, motors and drives, and also sensors, and accessories, spare parts. So that's also part of what we do.
And just to give you a bit of an understanding of the complexity of the product portfolio and the dynamics that are in there is that you have motors and drives. And for the ones that are not familiar with motors and drives, motors basically anything that creates motion and a drive controls the power of that motor. So it's basically a control device. So it goes anything from a very small, let's say, from the size of, let's say, your fist or a dog house to something that can fill this entire room here. So you can imagine also the complexity when it comes to building an e-commerce platform, what that means.
If you go more from the left side here, this is high volume, let's say, made to stock type of products, and if you move more to the right, these are more engineered to order products.
So now talking about really e-commerce. So why did we do this and how did we do it? And why is always a very easy question to answer. It's because our customers are asking for it. And what you see here is basically at the beginning, at the very, very beginning, before we did anything, in terms of technology or development or anything with Adobe Commerce, is we asked them. We sent out a global survey to about 3,000 customers, got about 300 respondents. And what they told us is that what you see here as well as information is the most important, what they're looking for in terms of online experience. And I think that's something we hear as well across other sessions, the ones that I've attended.
And the typical, let's say, e-commerce, the order placement is actually priority number four. So this is ranked, what you see here. And this really gave us our focus. Often times, I get asked the question, my job title is Strategy Lead, so what's your e-commerce strategy? Well, my personal opinion that e-commerce is never a strategy. E-commerce is part of your strategy.
But if you have to say something about an e-commerce strategy, it's basically asking your customers what do they want and that becomes your strategy. And this is what we're trying to do as well with emotion, is trying to get this implemented in a modern e-commerce platform.
If you take one step, let's say, elevate yourself even above this, what is the common, let's say, denominator in all of this? It's the ability to self-serve. So our customers are basically telling us, give us the facilities to look for information and place orders just to do it ourselves. We don't need you. We don't need your salespeople to, and then actually, that gives us a delay, right? So you need to place an order in the evening. You want to have it confirmed immediately. If you need to do it through a salesperson, this takes time, right? It needs to also be available.
So also, a bit more, why do we do this? What do we want to get out of it as a business? ABB is a commercial organization. We need to get something out of it. Ultimately, online orders is what's on most people's agenda. And why that is because it's easy to track. It's easy to imagine what you mean with online orders. And this also correlates with adoption, let's say, of an e-commerce platform, a modern e-commerce platform. But ultimately, if you look at the value you want to get from a business, from something like e-commerce, but not only e-commerce...
Basically in ABB, two main things are important. One of them is productivity. So basically, the orders you get with the amount of headcount you have, that's productivity, so an increase in productivity and growth. And that leads to, of course, profitability. But these are the two main drivers, let's say, of anything we do in a business. These are the two main things we look after. You see that there as well in terms of objectives that we have...
And there you also see something called increased efficiency. And increased efficiency is the ability to be easier to do business with between customers and ABB. And this is more an intangible one, but we see or we hear, we hear from customers that ABB is not always the easiest one to do business with. So how can we increase that? How can we make it easier? That's the increased efficiency part.
So now we know why we do it and what we want to get out of it. Let's start talking about the actual e-commerce platform. And what we have built in the last couple of years is something we call ABB Shop. And this is a modern e-commerce platform for our partners and customers. And there's a few, let's say, design principles that we started off with, and the one that is the most important one is standardization. It's standardization that we don't, for example, mirror our organizational setup to our customers. So you're looking at, how do you serve your customers the way they want to be served? They don't buy from one single division out of the seven. They buy from ABB. So today, just to give you an idea, we have multiple order intake platforms, electronic order intake platforms. Not like we're starting from zero in this e-commerce journey, but every division have their own e-commerce platform or order intake platform. So how do you bring harmonization to this landscape? That's what we try to do here as well. And so standardization is one user experience, all divisions, all countries.
Of course, there are some...
Let's say, deviations from this, and that's the last point there. The deviations can be made but it all comes down to one platform where you maybe configure certain functionalities in some countries and you turn them off in other countries. But ultimately, there's one platform across the entire globe for all countries where we are active in.
Another important one is that whenever we introduce a new e-commerce platform, this ABB Shop, is that we don't go back in levels of automation or user experience. That's something we hear from customers, from our business, is don't let us go back in time, right? Even though it looks better, make it more efficient or at least the same. So that's what we're trying to do here as well. And another important one is, what we've been working on very hard is, not to invent the wheel ourselves. So we use a lot of third-party applications or things like shipping information.
So that's also one thing that we implement here in this platform. And with Adobe Commerce, this is, of course, a great platform to do that. There's a huge network and the ecosystem around this that allows you to easily integrate into many of these third-party platforms or applications.
So it's not clicking.
That goes too far. All right. So ABB Shop, how does that look like? Just very quickly from an architectural point of view. I'm not a technical person, so I will just go over this very high level.
ABB Shop is based on Adobe Commerce, as we were saying, and there's a lot of services in the backend that we call to. So we have Adobe Commerce as a very thin layer on top of existing systems and applications, and we call the data from those application, pricing data, customer data...
Real-time into the frontend and expose that to our customers. Brings a lot of challenges, but this is really where the value-add is of a platform like ABB Shop or Adobe Commerce.
The integration layer is also key. And why this is key is that in a digital ecosystem, what you are building is not just for one frontend. So e-commerce is just one frontend, one application facing our customers. So how do you ensure you get the data out of your backend and not just integrate to one platform, but make that data available to multiple platforms in the entire digital ecosystem. That's what the integration layer is for.
And one other key to our success to be able to scale this was that we have a lot of ERP systems in ABB. I'm not going to tell you how many, but a lot. So how do you integrate with that? How do you make sure that you get all of the relevant data out of all of these different ERPs that are customized to fit the needs of the local markets? And we have an order management system already in place, not in every country. And what we do is we call that order management system instead of the ERP systems that are there. And this allowed us also to go very fast. So basically, this means implementing first where it's not there yet, the order management system, and then on top of that, you build an e-commerce platform. This allows you to move very fast from one country to another when you don't have or you have multiple different SAP systems or different ERP systems.
All right, so what did we do so far? From a business perspective, you want to scale e-commerce. You want to do it fast, ideally. That doesn't always go easily, and there's different dimensions when it comes to scaling. And this is what, in general, we talk about when we talk about scaling e-commerce. There's three key, let's say, separate dimension. There's functionalities, portfolio, and countries. And by countries, an extension of that is customers. So you get access to customers. And to start off, you start off very small. And here we, for example, took two pilot countries, and the main focus in the beginning was to go up.
So what we did here is-- That needs to click. There we go. So we went up. So we went up into the functionalities. We didn't bother too much about looking into other countries or more portfolio. We need to make the basics work. So that's what we did in the pilot countries...
And then we move over to the other areas. An example of this is that...
Our business is built on quotations. If you're also in a B2B business, you will also, I think, recognize this, that customers, they typically ask us for better prices than they have agreed. And what that means is that now we don't want to facilitate, in general, the quotation process through an e-commerce platform. It's a business decision, but the conversion of a quote to an order is something the customer can do themselves. So that's also something we introduced, but we introduced that only about a year ago. So we didn't do that when we started scaling and across the other dimensions. So this also is to show that even though you built something, you built the core capabilities but you don't need to have everything before you start scaling in the other dimensions. So this is also what we did. And if we talk about portfolio, and actually this slide is already a little bit older...
There is-- How we built this is that we look at divisions that are in scope, and some divisions are not in scope, as you can imagine, more complex products.
But the ones that are in scope also have some products that we cannot sell through e-commerce. But that gives you your e-commerce portfolio. And in line with standardizations, you want your countries to be able to select their portfolio. You don't want to give a one-size-fits-all to a country. So what we were able to do is create a menu of portfolio that is able to be adjusted as well by country.
Now one learning of this actually is that not many countries do this. So it's possible, but not many countries do it. But the possibility is there, for sure.
So this is the portfolio dimension. Now let's talk about the country dimension and how did we select the countries we went after. And in general, and this was done all the way at the beginning, we looked at what is the best fit for a country for e-commerce. Where do we start? It's always a very important question. Where do we start? And you see there are two dimensions, your external attractiveness and internal attractiveness. And if you look at your external attractiveness, you look at your market growth, but also digital, let's say, affluence, in a country or digital majority of a country, but also regulatory pressure in B2B, and if you're in the B2B industry, you know that there's a lot of compliance involved. So how is the regulatory pressure looking in some of these countries? And then you also look at the internal, and there's a bunch of them here. I won't go through it, but basically, a very important one is that it's not just about, Let's say, the backend in place. There's much more to it. So one of them that we saw as being quite influential is the tactical dimension, which is actually at the bottom. Basically tells you on paper, maybe this country doesn't look like the best option, but it's an influencer for other countries. So if we get it on the platform, other countries will look at it and they will follow. So that's also something that we looked at.
Now this is where it ended up. And in general, this is more of a guidance. It's not to the letter or to the decimal in terms of rating that we went through to these countries. This is more that gave us an idea of which countries, which wave of countries to go for first, then maybe second, maybe third.
And our pilot countries were, no surprise, these two. So now there are some learnings here. And I do want to reflect that, right? So was this the right pilot countries to go for? And the reason we took these countries, especially the top right one, it looks very attractive. So this one is a no-brainer.
Always a pilot, it's always a question, a trade off, of being able to go somewhere fast versus the importance of a market. And this one, the big one, was a very important market. And we went there and we learned a lot. It's still not done. So it's a long journey. It doesn't all go as fast. So it maybe was a good pilot country.
What we learned is that, especially in big markets, you need to have the local presence of your e-commerce team, even if it's a global e-commerce team. Have them locally. Have them close in terms of proximity, ideally, but time zone, for sure. And we work very close with the local team to define this, to define what is needed for this platform to work.
All right.
Now...
Where are we today in terms of countries? So you saw a lot of them. Today, we're in 30 countries. So a lot of that graph you just saw, all of them are most likely, all of them are already done. By the end of the year, go into 45+ countries. And I want to highlight a couple of them. And this is by no means a generalization. It's more an anecdote, and it's really good to understand the power of the Adobe Commerce platform and ABB Shop, how we name it. And for example, in Poland, what we see is that within no time...
Over 90% of the orders that a country received went already through e-commerce.
Within a year, 90%. That's incredible. We don't see that in any other country. So the question is what makes Poland so special, or how can we apply that also in other countries? India and China, also very interesting cases. In both of them, we went from discovery, so understanding what we need to do, to actually a customer placing an order in less than a year with Adobe Commerce. So this is typically Adobe being American company. You would think that the more you move to countries like China, this becomes more of a challenge. Yes, it was a challenge, and it was a lot of work. We made it work. And also with the help of Adobe, but also many of the partners that we work with. So China and India are definitely-- Even in big markets, you're able to move very fast with something like this.
Then another topic that everyone talks about, even in the Keynotes, personalization. So personalization, what do we see under personalization? Basically, personalization, I needed to check this with ChatGPT what personalization in a B2B context means, but I think there is no one way to define personalization. I think everyone knows what it is. But trying to make a bit sense of it, that's what I try to do here. So basically, when you start-- And this is a crawl, walk, run approach in terms of personalization. It's basically, you start with a one experience for all your users on the platform. And this can be, for example, as you see here a standard catalog, you show just all your catalog on the web shop. And this is no different than for any user that sees it. Product-centric, that's also what we have. For example, if someone doesn't log in, you can go there to the web shop right now. You will see all our products, but it's very product-centric and no prices. So if you're not logged in to the web shop, you don't see prices, but this is for everyone. So the next level, if we go on one level down, we see one experience for many users.
For example, if you look at translations, this is typically where you get to. So we have storefronts in every one storefront per country. And there are translations done in each one of these storefronts. And for all of the group of users in that country, this is a unique experience.
Well, if you talk about maybe Dutch, not Spanish. Spanish, you have in more countries, of course.
But it's translations typically. Again, this is not everything, but this, just to give an idea, we go to the next level. It's one experience for few. And in B2B, sometimes it makes sense to stop here. And why is that? You want to give one experience for, let's say, a company level, where you talk about company-specific products, customer prices, company prices. We don't want that to differ depending on who's logging in or who is seeing it.
Order tracking, order status, that as well. So personalization goes to a level of one experience for few, and then the ultimate level is one experience for one. And there we see, for example, and this comes, kind of blows over a little bit from the B2C side, right? So recommendations, you can save filters. That's really what brings the view in your journey to a one-to-one experience. One experience for one user.
Now we're working on this and some of these elements are, as I said, crawl, run, crawl, walk, run. So also when it comes to blog posts, how do we make blog posts, for example, more relevant for the user that's looking at it? So do we show company-specific blog posts or user relevant blog posts? And when you go from product-centric to maybe segment-centric views of your storefront, this creates a more, let's say, tailored experience for your users.
Am I doing on time? Okay? - You're doing good. - Okay.
All right. What's next? We like to look at things through the point of view of the customer. So you see here also the customer journey. This is a general one.
But basically, there are many interesting things still ahead of us. Besides the 45 plus countries that we're going to, it's also about listening to your users or customers. We did that at the start. We kept doing that throughout. And in the future, what's coming is really institutionalizing this within the company. How do you bring that culture of, let's put the customer first, let's not talk about what you want, what I want, let's talk about what the customer wants? And that really brings us success in these cases. And everything else that I will list here hinges on this.
The next one, I think everyone can relate to adoption, always a hot topic, but basically, we are building an e-commerce platform. An e-commerce platform is not for the entire customer journey and it shouldn't be. It's very specific, specific to the buying part of the journey. So driving adoption of this e-commerce platform at the core is really one of the key things we're looking at right now. 90% in Poland is great, but not all countries are there. How do we get the countries there? So driving adoption.
Digital ecosystem, I was talking about that as well.
Today, we have many applications that are facing our customers. And customers, I was talking to a customer last week here in the US, and I asked him this question, "Do you need that the e-commerce platform is connected to other applications?" He said, "Yes, please do that. Please do that. I want to make sure that if I need drawings later on and I know which order I place the product in, then I can just put the order number in there and get drawings." But, yes, it's important. So it's not just because we love connecting applications and love the technology and it's possible, customers are asking for it.
Personalization, of course, everyone's doing that, I think.
But really understanding your users and using the data you get from users to better tailor, to keep tailoring and learning to better serve your customers. This self-service is so important. Understanding how you can do that more effectively and make it more efficient to work with that customers work with us, that's one of the key things we're looking at.
And then the last one, and not the least one, it's building the right teams. This has not been a one man show. I'm talking about it now, but there's a whole group of people even here in the room that have been able to realize this. And as we move into the future, the ambition of ABB is not just to stay at where we are, it is to grow. And you can only grow if you have the right people. So understanding how you build the right teams and how you get the right capabilities in the organization, that's going to be key.
I think that's it in terms of what we did well. Now let's talk about the things we didn't do well.
I was talking already about the pilot country, so the big one. So we have basically two worlds within ABB, one that goes on the order management system and one that doesn't have the order management system. So in the beginning, what we did is we built two types of our storefront. One that goes directly to our ERP system and one that's built on the order management system. Is it right? Is it wrong? I don't know. But what is very important is that these are two different kinds of capabilities you need in the backend to understand how to get the data into the frontend, expose it to the customers. And that's something we haven't emphasized enough. So what we saw is that, we thought that both of them are equal and we could do it with the same group of people.
And what turned out is that actually, it is very different. Understanding your ERP landscape and how that ties into how data goes up to the frontend is extremely important. So that's one.
Then something about vision. So what we managed to do is oversell the vision of e-commerce. We thought we could do a lot of innovative stuff already at the beginning, but it took us a long time. It took us a long time to get it right. So we promised things like Punchout. I already had it on the screen here. Marketplace, an online marketplace, which sounds great and is really wonderful, but if you cannot get the basics right...
Anyone in the management team of any company would say focus on the core before you branch out into new things. And our vision was also based on branching out into new things. So we needed to recalibrate that as well, not only within our team but also within the organization. So that's something that I think we also, looking back, we should have done a bit differently. How do you really focus on the core? Get that right.
Then what is also important to know, ABB is a-- That's the next mistake. ABB is a decentralized organization, which means that divisions and countries have a lot of autonomy to define how they set themselves up. And just because on paper it looks simple, doesn't mean that it is actually simple. So taking some time beforehand to really understand how does the landscape look like are the processes set up properly, and is it being used properly, goes a long way than when you introduce an e-commerce platform to actually get it working. So we saw that a lot. We thought it looks good, systems are there. We didn't look too much into the processes because we thought some countries are just like others. And then we came with an e-commerce platform and suddenly prices didn't show up, customer data wasn't right. So taking a step back, doing the homework a bit more, and not treating every country like they are the same...
Would allow us to get a bit more speed in some of the countries that we have live today.
That's it. All right. Over to you back, Scott. - Thank you. - Thank you, Maurice. So Maurice will be back up again in a Fireside Chat and Q&A shortly. So like I mentioned, I'm going to be talking about Adobe Commerce in respect of our B2B and just a short journey in respect of B2B to start with. Now this first slide is really talking about, "Things have never been this fast, nor will they ever be this slow again." And I was just sitting and reflecting on it. This is a Justin Trudeau quote, which probably hasn't aged that well in the current climate of tariffs, but I created it before the tariffs came in. So for B2B, a lot of what we see, it's challenging, right? Everything is moving so quickly and a lot of our B2B businesses, we've got other legacy systems, in some cases, what we see and I have Japan, Asia-Pacific role, I travel around a lot, meet with a lot of customers, we sometimes in B2B businesses have what I call analog leadership, leaders that have been there for a very long time, started their careers before this whole digital revolution started, and don't initially have the risk appetite to make massive quick investments, and so it's challenging, right? But at the same point in time, from a B2B perspective, we've made big changes over the years, whether it be the Industrial Revolution where we have changed effectively from manual labor to steam, or we've changed processes with Kaizen. This is the Japanese process of improvement in the 1970s, and then more recently is this change from the way that we sell, right? We used to have Rolodex, we used to have phones, we used to have fax, etcetera, and now we're having to change and I think COVID really disrupted that face-to-face or these legacy type relationships that we have with customers. And so we continually having to disrupt ourselves and change, and as long as we recognize that we've made it through every single time, we understand that we're on the path to a renewed focus around the business. Now it does initially come without some challenges, right? And those challenges can be compounded whether it be from an integration perspective, it might be poor data quality, it might be a lack of strategic direction or the risk appetite that I talked about before, right? All of this comes with challenges. One of the most common things that I hear when I talk to B2B organizations is that they say our business is complex. It's too complex to be simplified by technology, all right? And so hopefully through this presentation and other presentations that you're going to hear over the next couple of days, we're helping you understand that we can distill that down. I don't disagree that there are some areas that are still going to be complex for your business. They're still going to be challenging to overcome, but certainly technology has moved rapidly to help address some of those challenges that you face.
Now what we also face is this dichotomy or the yin and yang, which is internal changes, as well as external changes. Now the internal changes being things like procurement, right? So obviously we sell to B2B businesses. They have procurement managers, whether we like it or not, those managers, hands up in the room, who are millennials? There's a few. There's a few millennials in the room. All right, some people probably put their hand up, not really millennials. But 70% of procurement managers are millennials, right? And they have this expectation around how we interact with them. Maurice talked about his customers pushing their business to adopt these B2B digital transactional ordering capability, and that's partly because the people that are making those decisions, they've got great personalization. They've got great B2C transactions in their personal lives. They actually want it in their business lives. And there are stats to show that these millennials have a higher demand for personalization in their work lives than they do in their personal lives, and their personal lives are already amazing, to a degree. I'm sure that we can always improve, but they actually have a high expectation. And so if we don't deliver that personalization to these customers, they effectively will deflect, in a lot of cases, their influences as part of the purchase decision. On the outset, looking externally outside of the business, is also this idea that we're continually having to evolve, whether that be the product mix that we offer, the states or the countries that we operate in, the business units or merchandise categories that we sell to is continually evolving, right? Standing up our own fulfillment centers all comes with these external challenges that create additional complexity for our businesses that we continually be dealing with.
Now Adobe Commerce and our B2B capability has been around for a very long time. I want to spend a lot of time diving into it, but I will talk about some of the stuff in the next couple of slides that we have released recently and what's on the future roadmap for the rest of this year. Suffice it to say, we have this ability to be able to handle complex procurement processes, right? We talk about this complexity comes up all the time, right? And no organization's the same. Some of your customers might say, "Look, we're okay for one or two individuals to sign off an order that's under 100K, but maybe for another customer they might have a different requirement, maybe it's only under 25K." If you want to get up to 100, that's going to take 3 different individuals in the organization to be able to sign that off. We have things like seller assist, we have quote templates to be able to help customers that regularly order from you with roughly the same product mix, be able to do that time and time again and they could do that with single-click or we can streamline that down to very few clicks so that they're not having to recreate that quote time and time again. And then we've also scaled up the scalability and how scalable and robust the technology is, right? If you were in the road map session today, you would have heard around our composable data model that we're rolling out and is available on our PaaS solution and is coming shortly to our Commerce Optimizer and Cloud Service solution. And we continue to put rig around this technology and I'll talk a bit more about that shortly. Now I'm going to talk very quickly about some of the other areas that we've deployed capability. This is recent, and this is actually October last year, just making sure that you're aware of it, right? So when we talk about buyer groups, does everyone understand? Put your hand up if you don't understand what a buyer group is. Just a few hands in the room. Okay, so buyer groups, effectively for larger organizations, they have buyer groups. Adobe has a buyer group. So we have individuals that form part of a group, let's call it group A, and you might have group B and group C. And group A can buy for, this might be geographically structured, so they might be able to buy for anything that is applicable to North America, or they might be the European group, or they might be the Asia-Pacific group, or they might be across a specific function. Let's take Kellogg's example. They might have a cereal group, they might have a snacks group, or organics group, or whatever. Those buyers buy for those individual groups, or might be brand related, right? And we can use a number of examples around automotive brands that have the parent, but those buyers buy for individual brands within that group. And so some buyers might have the ability to buy for a single company, but in a lot of cases, they're buying for a multitude of company. And in some cases, we have buyer groups that overlap, right? And so what we've given you here, this is part of our 1.5.0 release that happened in October, was this ability to be able to very quickly easily jump between these companies to be able to buy and persist those shopping carts and be able to order for those companies. Now the other thing that is a request that we have had from our customers is to have a similar capability for admin. That is coming in April. So I know a couple of you been asking for a while, it is coming in the release next month, so something to look forward to. Just to continue with this thread a little bit around, company accounts and buyer management is also the lens around is a conglomerate. You might be operating across a number of different industries. That could also be a mixture of just B2B type businesses or that might be a mixture of B2C and B2B type businesses. It could be for global companies. It could be for those B2C, B2B, or B2B2C mix. And so this just gives you a high degree of flexibility to be able to buy across those groups. What does it look like on the frontend? We call this the storefront context switcher. We're not great in naming our products, but can be a bit of a mouthful, but in this case, what we see here is that you will actually have a drop-down within the actual interface, right? So this is where a buyer could be buying, they've got an order from a specific group, they're going to very quickly swap between those individual companies as they make those purchases, and so they can very quickly do that. And as they swap between the companies, there might be different contracts that are being negotiated, there might be different pricing, there might be different products that are available to that specific company, right? I'll give you an example, right? So the buying group for Asia-Pacific for Adobe, they might be buying HP laptops, right? Well, the products that are available for Australia are going to have the Australian electrical plug on it versus the ones that are available in Asia versus the ones that are available in India, right? And so you're not going to show the same product catalog. There's also going to be difference in pricing. And so as that buyer shifts across that, they'll be able to see the different products, the different pricing that's available and be able to create the shopping carts for that.
Then from a quote template perspective, the ability to be able to create these templates, to be able to create very sophisticated quotes, we can and until recently, we could provide quotes at a template level and a line item level. We're expanding that KPI or we have expanded that capability, so you can now also set this up as part of the ability to be able to order. Like I mentioned, you might have, we had a customer in New Zealand that is, they're a meat business, they service a bunch of restaurants. Quite often these restaurants are ordering roughly the same product mix every week, and they want to be able to simplify that. So what we can do now is we can actually stand up this quote template from negotiated pricing already embedded in that, maybe that pricing is negotiated as part of the contract, and we can either set a date limit on it or we could set a number of times the actual quote template is actually used, and it'll then expire and we then renegotiate and re-create the quote. And so we're giving you more ability to be able to manage this much more sophisticated quote application process.
Now you would have heard, hopefully for those that were at the Keynotes this morning, but also within the roadmap session that we just finished, is around this ability to be able to handle or deliver what we call now our Cloud Service. So we have our on-prem capability, we have our platform as a service, and now we've broadened our product offering to actually include Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service, which is a fully SaaS service. I want to spend a huge amount of time diving into this. I will talk about this in respect of B2B shortly, but effectively, this will allow you to be able to obviously deploy very quickly, deploy to new regions, deploy new brands and into new markets, and it comes with a host of additional capability around asset, image creation, etcetera.
For e-commerce, our ACO, so Adobe Commerce Optimizer products, a lot of B2B businesses have incumbent commerce solutions, right? This might be competitive solutions like an SAP, but it's so embedded in the business and they don't have quite often B2B businesses don't actually have the same degree of risk appetite as B2C businesses. One of the things that we found is that it's really-- They want to deliver amazing shopping experiences for their customers, but the technology is really embedded, it's going to cost them a lot to be able to rip it out. And so with our Commerce Optimizer solution, we can now layer on top of any commerce solution that you might use in within your business and still provide that amazing, high-performance commerce experience on top of whatever transactional solution you want to be able to use, right? And so we're obviously now streamlining that. We're allowing you to be able to ingest your product information from your PIMs, your ERPs, it could be multitude of, it might be organically built with in-house, etcetera. We can ingest that, and then deliver this amazing B2B experience on the frontend.
You would have also heard hopefully about our catalogs. So we've gone through a number of different iterations around our catalog. The latest iteration on this catalog, again, we call this the Composable Commerce Data Model, and it can handle 250 million SKUs. More importantly, it can handle 30,000 different prices for each individual SKU. We can ingest information with what would have taken potentially days if you had to do your entire catalog, we can now do within hours, right? And so we can start then, we can deliver a highly performing frontend on so we have what's called policies and channels. Now if you're interested in this, and I imagine most of you in this room, particularly around B2B, are faced with catalog challenges around pricing challenges, I encourage you to go to the session that's on later today. It's at 4:30 where we're talking about our Commerce Optimizer solution. But essentially, this allows you to have a single catalog no matter whether you're selling to, direct to one of your own OEM businesses within a particular country or maybe selling through a distributor that's then on selling to another retailer or whatever it might be, you're trying to handle a whole lot of complexity in respect of your SKUs, your pricing, and so forth. This effectively is the solution for that, right? Through our policies and channels, you can then start to filter out which products, which prices are available in which market, to which reseller, or distributor, or retailer, or whatever that might be, right? So I encourage you to go to that session.
And then a last couple of slides here. What's happening in respect of our Edge storefront? So Edge is our highly performant frontend, right? Now that's been available with our B2C capability, what we call drop-ins, that's been available now for about nine months. Now B2B, in respect of our B2B capability, available on our Edge service, is going to be available by the end of the year, right? So these drop-ins that you can see up on the screen, they're going to be available and you're going to be able to get all of the benefits that you would have heard about from Edge in respect of high degree of indexation by search engines, meaning that you can decrease your paid spend because you're getting the same indexation and traffic that you would have got that you had to pay for previously, right? You're also getting a highly performant frontend, 4x quicker is the standard of what we've seen from a lot of customers. And so all of this capability is coming by the end of the year. Then we're also going to be releasing a storefront, a B2B storefront blueprint or template which of those that have seen some of our demos, we call this the Budaya 1. That's going to be released as part of it.
Very quickly, I'm going to talk about some successful customers on B2B to give you some understanding of the enterprise grade of this technology. So hopefully, most of you would have heard from Coca-Cola if you watched the Keynote this morning. They've done an amazing job in respect of deploying Adobe Commerce within Africa. Now I am from South Africa and tell you it's a really challenging environment to be able to operate in. Each of the countries operates independently. They've got different payment solutions for each country, etcetera. They're actually deployed now in more than five countries.
This is a case study that we did a few years ago, at that point in time they were at 74,000 or over 100,000 now B2B businesses that are buying from them, right? Now this is large scale supermarkets, it's restaurants, it's petrol stations, but it's also hawkers in the street, that are buying through them using Adobe Commerce. The really interesting fact that I find is that they they're going to commercialize this capability. So they're going to take their ability to be able to store, fulfill, supply chain, deliver that to B2B sellers, and offer that to adjacent partners like to tobacco companies, etcetera, and be able to open up this ability to be able to monetize that capability. Really interesting use case. And then we've got here as well, Quest, right? So Quest is a flooring company, also do roofing, one of the biggest companies in the US. They've seen phenomenal results as part of building this B2B portal, right. They've seen increases on average order value of 61%. Their transactional volume has gone up more than 400% and their revenue is up 633%. And then lastly, Toyota and anyone that's operated within the automotive arena understands that it's always challenging to deal with dealerships. A lot of these dealers are also franchisees. They got their own opinions on how the business should be run, but Toyota uses Adobe Commerce again and they've managed to deploy this to over 200 dealers and managed to do that in a very short amount of time and be able to manage the pricing and the product allocations and so forth that come along with that. So I think that gives you an understanding of what's happened from Adobe, some of the new releases, and some of the feature functionality that's going to be on roadmap shortly. Obviously, like I mentioned, I encourage you to go to the Commerce Optimizer session later on today. We're now going to jump to the Fireside Chat. I'm going to ask you a few questions, but I do encourage you to come up to the mics and ask, either Maurice or myself, some questions. We obviously want to learn from all of you, and hopefully, you get the answers to the questions that you want to hear. So I'll call up Maurice. We'll pull up a couple of chairs. It's going to be somewhat informal.
All right. Okay. Maurice, let's start with the first one. Major shifts in customers. Now I talked about this in respect of, obviously, demographic changes in respect of customers, but what have you seen in your industry and how has your business adapted to them? And obviously, you operate in multitude of countries, so there might be a slightly different lens for each. Yeah. I think the key here is that customers are asking for more and more information when they need it and where they need it. And that's, I think, the major shift that we've seen. Traditionally, e-commerce was mainly around order placement. So that was the need and we have platforms that do that. So what we're building is not another order placement tool. What we're building is a tool that can allow to self-serve around the buying journey. So I think that is really what we've seen in terms of shifts and expectations is that we need to have information and we need to be able to do what we want to do, when we want to do it, and where we want to do it.
You talked about some of your learnings. Let's talk about some of those in respect of challenges for your organization, now that could be technology focused or it could be organizational focused. What were some of those challenges in respect of just your commerce journey, adoption, deployment, rollout? Yeah. I addressed some of them, so I won't repeat that. One challenge that we see now we have the technology in 30 countries. Adoption is a major challenge. Adoption is a major challenge. And being able to understand why adoption isn't happening, that's the key challenge. That's the key challenge. So how do you bring data into this conversation, right? This is a technology project, or program, or initiative that most likely you're also running, and it's easy to blame technology why things aren't working. So we've done actually some analysis, and this is more anecdotal, again, because we're working on how do we institutionalize that. We looked at one country and we said, for the last month, let me see the, let's say, customers that placed less than 70% of their orders online or through ABB Shop, the top five in terms of volume. So we don't boil the ocean. We don't look at everything. We just look at the top five. What are the reasons? Order line by order line, right? So why didn't it go through? And surprisingly, technology was a big one. But the next big one is also people. People, processes, data. Those are a lot of reasons why adoption isn't happening. And for example, and I think it's a funny anecdote.
Some orders were not placed because someone on the customer's side was on vacation. So they sent an email. So this is what you see in the numbers if you look at this from a holistic perspective or high level perspective. But going into the data and understanding why things aren't working and then addressing them, that's the key challenge. Any quick wins for getting customers to rapidly adopt? If you know that, let me know.
Obviously, from a technology perspective and a lot of people in the room would have heard today, with respect to, we've talked about AI, we talked about automation, and data-driven decision-making, what are your thoughts in respect of these technologies and how they're transforming B2B? Yes. They will transfer. This is a very broad topic. Let me just highlight something I learned last week. I was talking to you about the customer I was meeting. I also asked him the following. I said-- The conversation was around you need documentation and we have the platform now, but now they need documentation. They need documentation around product documentation, but also once they place an order, order documentation. So I asked him, "What if you have an agent?" And you just say, "I want the product documentation of this particular product." And this agent with an AI model in the back could fetch that out of the backend and then present it to him. And I asked him, "Would this be valuable to you?" And he said...
"I use this in some other commerce platforms." And he said, "I think it's fun." Now that's not the reaction you want when you implement the technology that it's fun. You want to make their life more efficient. And so, I think, the real challenge or how it should be developing is understanding how customers can use this. And the real reason why he was not really using this was because he said it was fun so he did not take it serious or he could not take it serious. What came out of it? Because he knows the limitations of AI, but also his company had policies against using AI, so he could not actually use it. So while we think this will solve our problems and it will be great and wonderful five years down the road, is it actually-- Do we have the right environment that this can take off? Good point. So what would you give in respect of advice to other enterprise leaders that are looking to modernize their infrastructure while balancing, obviously, you got short-term ROI, but in a lot of cases as you pointed out in respect of your own journey...
It's a long-term digital transformation project? Yeah. Emphasize on the value you bring to an organization. Start small. So we started with two countries, and it's being able to demonstrate along the way how you are generating value, how you are able to realize what you say that you're doing. And for us, at least, this helps a lot, is to really communicate, emphasize what is the value you're bringing to the organization, what you are doing today ties into where you want to go, and show these wins. Even if they're small, show these wins to management, to your organization. This helps build up the trust. Because short-term ROI...
Then you're not going to have that so much in these things. It's expensive. In terms of, costly more than expensive, right? It takes a lot of effort, technology, everything comes together. And it takes time. It takes time. So being able to show quick wins or wins at least, or communicate those wins when they happen helps build the trust that what you're doing is on the right track. Great. Last question, before I'm going to hand it to the floor. So if you have a question, feel free to stand up. If you could go back and change one thing in respect of your digital transformation so far, what would that one thing be? We also talked about that. But if I want to summarize that, that's basically, you know I said in the beginning, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I didn't touch upon the ugly one. It can get ugly if you take your focus off the people. So it's a technology space, but if you lose the focus of the people in your organization, the people you work with, people have knowledge of your organization, how you build that into a digital ecosystem? I think that is something that needs to have extreme focus. And sometimes we lost track of that focus. So that is my main takeaway. Okay. All right. Jonathan. [Jonathan] Thank you so much for all of those insights. Just building on your point about people and also adoption, I'm really interested to hear how you worked with your sales team, so that they would be promoters and not feel threatened by 90% of orders now coming through this platform. Yeah. So what we, as design principles as well said, "We don't change the business model." So focus allowed us to really change something in a, let's say, small area while not disturbing the rest of the business. So what this means in terms of sales people is that the compensation and the, let's say, incentives they got for the orders that they bring in did not change if the orders were placed through e-commerce or through a phone call. So this allowed us to enable the sales people to go out there and say, "You know what? Here's a beautiful tool that you can use and let's have a talk about what really adds value to you." And then when you want to order it, you can do it whenever you want. Right. Very good. Any other questions? Sorry. Yeah. I'd like to say we have roving mics, but unfortunately, we make you get up for them. So you're going to have to burn a few calories.
[Man] I have a two-part question. The Optimizer is a separate product and requires separate licensing. How do we talk to our customers about that? And is it based on AEM? So if, as a agency partner, you have to build a practice around it, would it require your resource to be trained on AEM? Is it based on AEM, the storefront part? It's got components of AEM in it, right? So if you think about it, we all ladder up to the same leader, right? So Loni Stark, who runs both Content and Commerce, so frankly from a Commerce perspective, we're grateful for that. But effectively, think about I talked about the Edge Delivery Service that is coming from AEM, but we've obviously applied it into the shopping experience, so PDPs, etcetera.
It's being applied on the storefront side. And then when you think about it from a catalog perspective, the catalog is universal, right? It's the catalog that's available within our Cloud Service. It's also, to a degree, the catalog that you have available within PaaS. Yeah. There's capabilities there, our merchandising service. Yes, there is some merchandising capability around image generation and around variations, A/B testing, etcetera, but to a large degree, if you think about things like live search, recommendations, the baseline merchandising, it's the same that you have in PaaS that you have available in Cloud Service that you then have available in Commerce Optimizer. And it's a separate license? It is a separate license. Yeah.
Keep in mind that for these customers that are considering it, they have a third-party transactional system in place, so it is a separate license.
Any other questions? I think there was one over here. No? Didn't want to climb over people's feet to get to the mic. Anyone else? Okay, well, we might wrap it there. So if you could join me in a warm thank you to Maurice for sharing his knowledge. Thank you.
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