Automated Sales Process, improving marketing opportunities

The Bürkle B2B online shop offers a diverse portfolio of industrial & laboratory equipment like pumps, samplers, and systems for hazardous liquids. The highly specified products raise the bar in terms of data flexibility. The data is managed via a combination of PIM & ERP, distributing it throughout all of Bürkle's marketing platforms.

Business Needs

Bürkle contacted Pimcore partner agency diePartments for a make-over of their corporate website with an integrated B2B shop. Aside from a variety of general improvements and updating, the main goals were:

information content and user experience management
The possibility to combine content and commerce

The former non-responsive website offered only limited adjustment and editing possibilities. The shop data was integrated directly by an external system. Only a few designing or adjusting options were available upon creating new pages. No user-role adjustments, different tasks couldn’t be delegated.

The dynamic content and user experience were missing. For even small changes, they have to rely on the technical team. That way time-to-market for content modification and publishing was often prolonged.

Pimcore Solution

Pimcore was chosen for its versatile abilities. Plus, considering the unique characteristics of Bürkle’s B2B business, their existing ERP system needs to be deeply integrated with Pimcore.

Based on Pimcore, diePartments created an individual online shop, which is basically a store-front system. Seamless integration of the ERP via web services avoids duplicated processes and data.

To avoid any blocking of the page in case the ERP is not accessible or reacts slowly, it was important to decouple the front-end as much as possible. The store-front and all its processes like cart and checkout were developed as a module in Pimcore. diePartments invested in an excellent performance ‒ even on product pages with a lot of variants and real-time data from the ERP.

For versatile editorial possibilities, various Area-Brick widgets were designed and developed. They now provide editable functionalities to create structured content. In parts, even the layout can now be set via the newly build layout Area-Brick. This gives the customer's marketing team the desired flexibility to develop a variety of information pages.

As Bürkle already had a PIM system in place, it was necessary to develop a data importer that was able to import large amounts of XML data in 5 languages and images into Pimcore. This importer is still active today, but Bürkle plans to migrate all their product data and assets to Pimcore and use it as their company PIM, replacing the old one.

Business Results

The client has now a better understanding of B2B distribution processes and in-depth knowledge in designing and implementing business processes. It also provides an improved editing workflow based on different user-roles and tasks and can easily and quickly be assigned to their concerned departments.

Customers can take advantage of individually negotiated wholesale prices, volume discounts, and delivery conditions when ordering online. The seamless integration of the online shop with the company`s IT systems also automates internal processes for processing an order. This allows the sales team to concentrate on customer advice and new client acquisition.