Required: A Spare Parts Portal Which Buyers Would Actually Use

Bell and Howell services advanced technologies in high-growth markets, including comprehensive solutions in retail click-and-collect, pharmaceutical factory intelligence, consumer packaging automation, and production mail.

When its parent company became insolvent, Bell and Howell’s leadership filed for bankruptcy and moved fast to reinvent the company. A major priority was to reclaim a spare parts business that had gone into decline. But the company’s existing parts website, built on SAP ISA, was difficult to use, and customers had abandoned it.

Wanted: Lean, agile, SAP-integrated eCommerce

Anubhav Gupta, Dir. SAP Solutions, IT Group, explained the company’s search for a solution: “SAP acquired hybris and started encouraging customers to use it for ecommerce. But hybris didn’t align with our budget… these factors forced us to look outside SAP for a solution. And we found a lot of vendors that could design an ecommerce site, but very few that could integrate back to SAP.”

That integration was a make-or-break feature for Bell and Howell. Gupta put it this way: “Our IT team is small and busy. We couldn’t afford to dedicate huge blocks of our time to this project. That’s one of the reasons we selected Corevist as our partner… in terms of SAP integration, implementation time, and overall cost, we didn’t find any other vendor that could match Corevist.”

A Powerful eCommerce Portal, No Extra Work For IT

Corevist’s built-in, configurable SAP integration was an ideal fit for Bell and Howell. Since Corevist Commerce automatically enforces the relevant SAP business rules (including personalization for each user, like pricing and inventory availability), Bell and Howell could launch a powerful, B2C-style experience—all without heavy lifting from their IT department.

Anubhav Gupta put it this way:

“Based on the demos we saw and our due diligence, we believed that this project could be completed in a very short time, with minimal impact on my IT department. It turned out we were right.”

Across a series of focus groups, Corevist asked Bell and Howell’s real customers a provocative question: “Why can’t we put this software into production today?”

This question helps us uncover the things your dealers & distributors actually want in an eCommerce solution. It’s how we ensure that Corevist delivers the things your users need, no bloat included.

Anubhav Gupta put it this way:

“We consider Corevist to be more than just implementors. We consider them partners. We didn’t just dictate our requirements. Instead, we explored design options together and evaluated the different implications of each option.”

Since the project launched, Bell and Howell’s market footprint has exploded. Customer adoption has soared, and revenue shows a strong trendline in the right direction. The company emerged from difficult times with a strong spare parts business, a powerful web channel to support it, and the revenue growth to sustain future investment in a fast-changing market.

“We launched a multi-faceted marketing campaign to encourage customers to come try us again. We wanted them to know that we’ve made the order process much easier… customers have literally been applauding our changes. I think one of our customers said it best when he summed it up in one word, ‘Hallelujah.’”

–James Feely, VP and GM of Service Solutions