For SAP companies, one thing looms on the horizon: migrating from ECC to S/4HANA. This is a huge undertaking, and it requires the full attention of the IT department.

If you’re looking to replace a legacy ecommerce solution (or launch your first one), it may be challenging to determine which project comes first.

Should you digitize your commerce before your S/4HANA migration, or afterward?

Short answer: You should digitize your commerce yesterday. 😊

The good news is that Corevist’s front end UI (and built-in SAP integration) easily follow you from ECC to S/4HANA.

Here are the benefits you get when you implement now.

1. You give customers the experience they need today

Here’s an alarming statistic: 85% of B2B buyers will abandon a supplier with a lackluster digital experience.

If you’re planning to wait until you’ve implemented S/4HANA to launch B2B ecommerce, that’s bad news.

B2B ecommerce was important before the pandemic, but the legacy of COVID only makes it more critical. As B2B buyers face ongoing supply chain disruption, long backorder periods, and economic uncertainty, they’re looking for suppliers who make life easier—not harder.

Here’s what customers need in B2B ecommerce:

• Real-time product availability
• Real-time, personalized pricing
• Online ordering that honors their personalized pricing
• Self-service access to order status, history, and tracking
• Self-service access to invoice history
• Real-time credit status
• Ability to pay off invoices online
• And more

If you can’t offer this value today, you may be hard to do business with. If your competitors already offer great experiences, waiting 9-18 months to address this issue could affect your customer relationships. 

2. You make your organization even more customer-centric

Because your S/4HANA implementation touches every part of the organization, it comes with a certain risk. It can get everyone focused on internal problems—to the degree that your customer experience suffers.

In the digital age, your organization must be customer-centric. And the sooner you get B2B ecommerce in place, the sooner your digital business can align all stakeholders around the customer.

This is especially true if your B2B ecommerce solution includes prebuilt, configurable SAP integration, as Corevist does. This integration eliminates the gap between your internal processes and the customer, which pushes your organization to become more customer-centric.

3. You reap the benefits of digital business now

By nature, B2B ecommerce drives digital revenue.

With product catalogs, recommended products, and the ease of ordering (and reordering), B2B ecommerce helps companies realize more revenue than they can through channels like phone, fax, and email.

But B2B ecommerce ROI doesn’t end with revenue.

In fact, B2B ecommerce creates all kinds of cost savings by eliminating manual customer service work.

What’s more, B2B ecommerce drives more value from all channels. Consider the EDI customer who checks pricing and availability in B2B ecommerce, then places a larger order than originally planned through EDI. The sale gets logged as EDI, but B2B ecommerce played an invisible “assist” role.

This “dark impact” of B2B ecommerce can be quite significant. Read more here: The True Measure Of Success In B2B Ecommerce.

The takeaway: Digitize… yesterday!

If your B2B ecommerce experience leaves something to be desired—or if you don’t have B2B ecommerce—then there’s no reason to wait. You can launch Corevist now with an integration to ECC, and we can easily transfer your integration to S/4HANA when the time is right. This is how Corevist empowers you to delight customers today, while also future-proofing your digital business.