Bradley Manufactures a Great Ecommerce Experience on Znode
Situation
Bradley Corporation is a manufacturer of commercial plumbing fixtures and washroom accessories. Family-owned for over 100 years, Bradley has a long history of providing value to customers. Bradley excels at delivering products that meet technical specifications for large-scale contracted installations.
Bradley sells through distributors to large commercial wholesalers. The manufacturer has a distribution center based in California and consignment warehouses nationwide. The unique selling model required the business to find a B2B ecommerce solution to manage submittals, quotes, and orders regardless of channel.
Challenge
Bradley’s leadership strongly believes that creating great customer experiences, increasing sales, and differentiating from competitors requires investing in technology. To grow its market leader position, the manufacturer wanted to improve the quoting process and provide a complete view of orders to customers, distributors, and sales representatives: including real-time quoting with accurate shipping information. Bradley distributors also required inventory and pricing information to effectively bid on commercial jobs, which required high volume data calls.
Bradley needed the ability to ship in-stock products from the closest available Bradley or consignment warehouse to the ship-to location. Previously, buyers had to call a customer service representative to gain visibility of local warehouse stock levels. Bradley had additional shipment needs that included split shipments, buyer-determined delivery dates, and shipping date visibility for buyers.
Bradley’s legacy ecommerce platform was not designed for B2B ecommerce, and it experienced issues sharing data with multiple systems, including Bradley’s ERP and its shipping software provider. Bradley’s quoting capabilities were minimal, slow, and challenging to integrate with the business’s ERP system.
Bradley’s customers and distributors desired easier access to product information such as specifications, literature, case studies, warranties, and installation instructions. Buyers were required to call sales representatives or Bradley customer service to access this information.
Solution
After an extensive ecommerce platform search, the manufacturer decided to replace its inflexible, monolithic, legacy platform with a headless, API-first ecommerce platform, Znode. The platform solved Bradley’s primary need; a single centralized user interface for all channels and customers, which allowed distributor sales representatives to manage orders and internal customer service teams to process and support all orders. Znode’s account and user personalization capabilities allowed Bradley to create different order and pricing views based on rights and permissions for particular roles. Bradley administrators, distributor sales representatives, and buyers were delivered a login to the same portal to view the quote for a specific order. However, buyers were only allowed to see the price contracted with their distributor sales representative.
The Znode Commerce Connector provided the framework for Znode’s integration with Bradley’s Epicor ERP system and third-party shipping platform, enabling real-time shipping information and options within quoting and ordering for the manufacturer. Bradley was able to deliver split shipments based on buyer expectations, allowing buyers to select the closest Bradley warehouse and delivery date (whether the date was the next day or in 6 months). Split shipment groups also allowed accurate freight calculations to be included within quotes which could convert into an order.
Selecting Znode for B2B ecommerce gave Bradley the tools to deliver an excellent experience to both distribution partners and the contractors making the final purchase. Znode allowed Bradley to centralize product data on the storefront to showcase all necessary product information for buyers on product display pages. Technical data, color and finish options, literature, case studies, warranty, installation, maintenance, and an application gallery were all populated in tabbed sections. Znode efficiently hosted this information, with data being updated daily from Bradley’s PIM system. Similarly, Znode’s integration with Bradley’s ERP system facilitated a product configuration function on several of Bradley’s product detail pages to feed product configuration information directly from the ERP system.