Anixter Multi-Site Implementation

Industry

Industrial Supply

Location

Glenview, IL

Tags

SAP COMMERCE
PLATFORM IMPLEMENTATION
GLOBALIZATION
DIGITAL COMMERCE

Key Impact

Avatria worked with Anixter to deploy their flagship site to 79 countries significantly ahead of schedule.

+79
Countries

THE CHALLENGE

Launch Anixter.com in 79 countries in under a year.

By early 2019, Anixter (now part of Wesco), a billion-dollar industrial supplies distributor had determined serving global customers with a common Digital commerce platform was a key strategic goal. Although the site was long established as the backbone for their online presence in the United States and Canada, customers in 79 countries were left without a seamless online shopping experience.

PROJECT DETAILS

Recognizing that a massive globalization effort would strain a productive technical team already tasked with maintaining the existing site, Anixter decided to seek external help. Avatria was a natural fit. With experience shepherding other major businesses through similar globalization efforts in the past, and having already served as a trusted eCommerce partner for over two and a half years, Avatria offered a familiarity with the process and Anixter’s internal business systems that would be critical to the project’s success.

With the project’s strategy in place, Anixter and Avatria technical teams faced four primary challenges:

  1. Allow global customers to shop in any of Anixter’s 79 countries using their currency of choice.
  2. Support country-specific product availability and feature sets in an easy-to-maintain way.
  3. Assure compliance with all relevant consumer data privacy laws.
  4. Develop an SAP Commerce (Hybris) infrastructure able to support Anixter’s needs at scale—including country-specific experiences and a product catalog totaling 1.5 million products and over 40 million combined price rows.

GDPR Support

Privacy Was An Overarching Theme as Anixter Globalized

In addition to the work described in the sections below, a major component of the Globalization initiative was building GDPR support for Anixter.com.

Our first step was to synthesize the 99 articles that constitute the regulation into a set of rights that pertain to Anixter with respect to its online business. These rules were as follows:

  1. Right to be informed – Customers must be informed about how their data is being used.
  2. Right of access – Customers must be able to see what data Anixter has about them, and how it’s being used.
  3. Right of rectification – Customers will be able to request the correction of Anixter’s data.
  4. Right to be forgotten – Customers will be able to remove all “personal information” from Anixter.com.
  5. Right to restrict processing – Customers have the right to block processing of their personal data.
  6. Right to data portability – Customers have the ability to retain and reuse their data.
  7. Right to object – Customers have the ability to object to how their data is being used.

With these rights in mind, we cataloged all data saved within SAP Commerce to determine what elements could be classified as “personal information” under GDPR.

The Solution

The hallmark of Avatria’s work on Anixter’s Globalization project was making the formidable manageable. By first creating comprehensive strategy to govern the implementation, we were able to assure that the work to be completed was well organized, scoped, and trackable.

With the project’s plan in place, we began a “Globalization Foundation” project. This called for the upfront development of key functionalities, which would then be piloted in a single country for each region. Once viability and stability were assured, the onboarding of additional countries could be completed as a relatively simple configuration exercise.

1

Catalog Anixter.com functionality to determine which features needed to be supported in which regions.

We started by building a matrix of key Anixter.com features that were or were not applicable to various regions. From here, we were able to develop a set of country-specific feature toggles in the SAP Commerce Backoffice that could turn on and off functionality based on business requirements.

2

Create a process for gathering and implementing initial configuration data for each country.

A time-consuming but crucial element of any globalization initiative is the configuration of country-specific data that allow customers to shop and transact seamlessly. For Anixter, this included over 50 variables, all of which came from different sources across the company.

3

Develop logic to deliver customer-specific pricing and currency for purchases.

Anixter has a unique feature that allows customers to transact in their “customer currency.”

4

Design and build support for the deployment, synchronization, and indexing of multiple product catalogs.

We developed an index model that was able to service country-specific catalogs for 79 countries with only 2 indexes.

5

Develop a system to support localized content within a single shared catalog.

This system, which could be managed by business users, involved allowing components to be restricted on a per-country basis.

6

Configure available payment methods for each country.

As each country supported by Anixter.com has different requirements for allowable payment types, a mechanism was built to configure country-specific payment types without code changes.

7

Define product availability on the basis of country-specific inventory tracking.

Instead of maintaining country-specific product catalogs, we determined a product’s visibility on a storefront based on the already-existing country-specific stock level.

RESULTS

A Rollout to 79 Countries Months Ahead of Schedule!

The impact of Anixter’s global rollout was extensive and wide-ranging. The implementation and support of the global rollout occurred over a period of 10 months. With Anixter.com now available in 79 countries, Anixter has greatly expanded its digital footprint, and the revenue potential in these channels has increased accordingly.

Avatria’s relationship with Anixter dates back to 2016. In that time, we have engaged on numerous high-profile projects and initiatives, but none as impactful as globalization.

Avatria helped us determine the best roll-out strategy and then optimized it by developing and executing an approach that allowed us to onboard entire regions through simple configuration instead of complex software engineering. We would not have been able to successfully complete this initiative in under a year without Avatria.

Jody Fales, SVP | Digital Solutions