Frutiger: B2B eCommerce solution for 5,000 construction sites

With its new B2B eCommerce solution, Swiss construction company Frutiger has simplified its interaction with 5,000 construction sites. Each site can now order and rent products independently, with unique price conditions.

Challenge

The history of Swiss family-owned construction company Frutiger started in 1869. Today it has 23 subsidiaries and annual sales of 800 million francs. The company is involved in many independent projects, supplies materials, and rents out construction equipment to partner companies.

Image source: frutiger.com

For each project, whether it is building, road section, or tunnel, a separate small office is opened, and its own construction site is launched. There are more than 5,000 of such sites in the Frutiger system today, and each of them works autonomously. Back in the day, employees involved in all of these projects had to resolve the material procurement and equipment rental issues with the central office via phone calls and emails. The process required intermediaries and took too much time, so Frutiger decided to create a single eCommerce portal to simplify it.

Frutiger wanted to have an eCommerce system in which they could sell products and lease trucks, cranes, and other large machines to the construction sites. They signed different contracts with the construction sites so that each construction site would have different price conditions for the same products and services. The communication within the entire process was to be via Dynamics NAV ERP system already used in the company.

Frutiger made its own research on the existing eCommerce platforms and their functionality. As a result, they decided to go with nopCommerce and appealed to nopCommerce Gold Partner JMC Software AG for the project.

Solution

According to JMC Software CEO José Lopez, the website his company made for Frutiger is a typical B2B environment, where each construction site has its own login for the workers, and the principal officer has access to the vendor area of nopCommerce.

The multi-vendor functionality necessary for interaction between construction sites and the main eCommerce website is available in nopCommerce out-of-the-box. JMC customized multi-vendor area with a multi-tenant site area. The principal officer of the construction site has an overview of all the orders made by his workers.

Each person has a specific role for each construction site, which was the basis for the integration of special tier prices. So, each construction site employee would see special price conditions for the products.

All order processing takes place in nopCommerce. Frutiger has the main admin login. Admins dispatch the orders and change the status of every order in nopCommerce when they deliver it to the construction site. The email system sends notifications to the users: the construction site officer receives an email when one of his employees makes an order; Frutiger logistics center gets an email when the order comes in, and so on.

JMC has built different asynchronous processes that import and export the data from Dynamics NAV ERP system, such as contract, employee, and price information. When someone changes product information and order status in nopCommerce, these changes are exported in a special form back to NAV.

Though the new website was made for Frutiger, not only Frutiger subsidiaries can access it, but also its partner companies. With their logins, they can make orders from Frutiger as well, since it’s one of the leading suppliers of construction materials and technics.

Image source: frutiger.com

Results

The system was successfully launched at the beginning of 2019. Today there are:

• over 5,000 construction sites in the system;
• 1,250 products available.

Barbara Zumkehr, head of business applications at Frutiger AG, notes: “Our new vertical construction shop allows our employees to acquire material independently through the shop with dedicated construction site conditions. This not only makes our work easier but contributes greatly to centralization, digitalization, and personalization”.

In the future, the system will be enriched with more and more features, depending on customer needs.

JMC Software is a Swiss software company that specializes in the development of individual eCommerce solutions. The company also helps its clients with developing their digital strategy and design and supports them in shop-management right up to the required hosting solutions.