Lusill Gebauer, Customer Service
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The Ensinger Group is engaged in the development, manufacturing, and distribution of compounds, semi-finished products, composites, precision parts, and profiles made from technical plastics. The further development of proven manufacturing processes, new applications, and international expansion have earned the family-owned company a leading position in its industry. The company was founded in 1966 and today has approximately 2,700 employees at 34 manufacturing and sales locations worldwide, with an annual turnover of 616 million euros.
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1. Requirements Engineering
2. Interim Results
3. Implementation
How FÖRCH as a wholesaler shapes everyday customer life with digital services / 06/13/2023 / 3:15 pm / World Class Business Leaders
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Initially, the project team faced a number of challenges. First and foremost, Smart Commerce was not the first service provider commissioned by Ensinger, leaving only a tight 14-week window for taking over and completing the project. Smart Commerce's task was to select a technical ecosystem for Ensinger's online business. Given the complex requirements (global presence, Ensinger's wide product range including catalog items, custom cuts, and special productions), Smart Commerce began with a series of workshops for requirements engineering. With this, the Smart Commerce consultants aimed to create a requirements matrix to identify the appropriate eCommerce shop system. Another challenge was to continuously build on the preliminary work of the previous service providers without repeating workshops, and to engage intensively with existing assumptions.
Ensinger's complex corporate structure, with many individual business divisions and sales processes, required a system that would bring the various areas together. Although Ensinger was already using eCommerce solutions, these were characterized by in-house developments and customized SAP shops, leading to difficult-to-trace interfaces. Smart Commerce aimed to create a scalable foundation with uniform eCommerce processes to support Ensinger's digital transformation.
The Smart Commerce team initiated the eCommerce project with Ensinger through a fundamental Discovery Workshop to gain insights into the company and meet key stakeholders. The team defined and established a project vision, working methods, weekly meetings, and task distributions. Identifying all decision-makers allowed for early clarification of key questions regarding system usage. Ultimately, the goal of the Project Discovery series focused on understanding customer needs and expectations for the eCommerce solution, based on Value Proposition and Customer Journey.
Ensinger had outlined six sub-projects. These included, for example, the "WebShop" sub-project, "Customer Portal," and "Custom Cutting." For each sub-project, Smart Commerce's Digital Business Consultant team conducted a workshop with Ensinger. The information collected so far served as the basis for this Product Scoping Workshop series. In each session, the consultant team applied proven project methodologies to answer the following questions:
These questions were primarily aimed at determining which technology providers best fit Ensinger.
The choice of shop software for Ensinger by Smart Commerce was based on a thorough understanding of the company, its business structures, and specific challenges identified in workshops. The decision was based not only on technical specifications but also on a profound knowledge of Ensinger's daily business operations. For the decision-making process, the Smart Commerce team structured the gathered information and developed a detailed requirements matrix. This matrix made it possible to quantitatively assess the eCommerce systems using an ordinal scale, with Ensinger contributing specific weightings to the system features. The final selection was commercetools, after the team engaged in professional exchanges with providers and developers to align Ensinger's specific needs with the strengths of the software solutions.
commercetools emerged as the best choice. Based on its MACH architecture (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless), it offers the required flexibility to meet the needs of the various business divisions of Ensinger. Furthermore, it is distinguished by its scalability, security standards, and its multilingual and multi-tenant structure, making it ideal for international rollouts. Commercetools' positioning as an industry visionary by Gartner, along with its excellent price-performance ratio, confirmed its suitability as the centerpiece of Ensinger's future eCommerce infrastructure.
Ensinger, ein führender Anbieter in der Kunststoffbranche, stand vor der Herausforderung, sein umfangreiches Produktsortiment und komplexe Unternehmensstrukturen in die digitale Welt zu überführen. Gemeinsam mit Smart Commerce hat Ensinger eine maßgeschneiderte eCommerce-Strategie und eine umfassende Anforderungsmatrix entwickelt. Die daraus resultierende Systemauswahl ermöglichte schließlich den nahtlosen Übergang zur Implementierungsphase der ausgewählten Shopsoftware und eine erfolgreiche Überführung der verschiedenen Geschäftsbereiche in das eCommerce-Zeitalter.
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The collaboration between Smart Commerce and Ensinger began with detailed requirements engineering, which brought numerous advantages for the further course of the project. Through the jointly conducted system selection, the project team was then able to start the implementation phase directly and efficiently. Key decisions had already been made on a solid basis, the project backlog for implementation prepared and structured. The reasons behind the requirements were retained and transferred to the development team. Moreover, all necessary coordination with key stakeholders such as IT and marketing had been completed, enabling seamless integration into customer structures. Smart Commerce and Ensinger thus started the implementation phase with a smooth transition and without any loss of time.
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