BayWa E-Commerce Landscape

BayWa AG is the largest agricultural trader in Germany and a major international player in agricultural and renewable energy business. Founded in 1923, the tradition-steeped company with cooperative roots and headquarters in Munich has developed into a globally oriented group that offers solutions and products for customers in the energy, agricultural and construction industries. The group has around 20,000 employees worldwide and generated a turnover of 17.1 billion euros in 2019.

In stationary retail, BayWa has more than 200 sales locations in Southern Germany and Austria. Customers have appreciated the personal consulting services at these locations for decades. The group is also successfully driving forward the expansion of digital processes. For example, BayWa AG operates several online platforms which comprehensively map the product ranges for farmers, customers from the building materials trade and the energy industry as well as their private and business customer processes.

INITIAL SITUATION & OBJECTIVES

dotSource has been supporting BayWa AG for several years, both in terms of consulting services and with regard to the technical implementation of digitalisation projects. Initially, an e-commerce platform based on SAP Commerce was implemented for the BayWa Building Materials business unit in 2016. The objective was to make the range of products and services of the BayWa Building Materials business unit accessible online to both B2B and B2C customers, taking into account the different needs of end consumers and business customers.

After the successful launch of the building materials online portal, the group also commissioned dotSource to implement the online shop for agricultural products and equipment in order to visually unite the different business units into one e-commerce landscape. Furthermore, the platform was to be optimised with regard to the weak mobile infrastructure in rural areas and was to be seamlessly linked to stationary retail.

PROJECT SCOPE & IMPLEMENTATION

The cooperation on the e-commerce platform started with a series of workshops. Diverse use cases and strategies were developed in order to provide customers with a real cross-channel experience.

Besides setting up an e-commerce landscape based on SAP Commerce, it was necessary to integrate it into the existing system landscape and to integrate the SAP ERP system, for example. BayWa now successfully operates an online shop for everything the construction industry might need as well as an online shop with a comprehensive range of agricultural products and equipment. Moreover, the portal also redirects users to other services of BayWa AG, which has also positioned itself as a financially strong partner with decades of experience and local presence.

SUCCESS & ADDED VALUE

Only a few years ago, B2B commerce was considered practically impossible to digitise: the specific requirements were deemed too complex and diverse. This is changing rapidly as the success of the BayWa e-commerce landscape shows. Thanks to continuous cooperation, dotSource and BayWa have managed to not only make a sophisticated variant logic accessible within two e-shops, but also to convey information and prices of a wide variety of products and services in a customer-oriented, detailed and personalised manner.

After the successful launch of the BayWa Building Materials online portal in 2017, the e-commerce landscape was expanded with the online shop of the Agriculture and Agricultural Equipment business unit in 2019 and the system landscape was consolidated. In the future, the pillars of the e-commerce portal will grow together even more closely with additional features. Find out more about the project in our success story.