During the B2B Online 2023 Florida event, Matt Swan, Technical Product Manager at ACE Southern, sat down with Andy Hoar and Brian Beck of Master B2B to discuss how the company is harnessing the power of composable commerce to meet the needs of its customers and build revenue. He also participated in “Embarking and Enhancing Your Digital Transformation: Success Factors and Challenges When Growing,” a panel discussion led by Michael Scholz, Vice President of Product and Customer Marketing at commercetools.
In both conversations, Matt was candid in sharing his experiences leading the digital transformation of the company. Here, we summarize ACE Southern’s technology journey and share Matt’s insights on the impact composable commerce is having on the business.
A leading manufacturer and distributor in the oral surgery space, with a specialization in bone grafts, ACE Southern is the result of a 2022 merger between ACE Surgical Supply and Southern Anesthesia and Surgical (SAS), both subsidiaries of Henry Schein. It operates independently as a small company that has, according to Matt, a very small tech team. “I’m the only full-time employee working on this — on any given day, there are five guys (developers from Hero Digital) and most of them are limited to about 10 hours a week.”
He said that his focus every day is on finding ways to enable the business to compete with larger organizations, stressing that this is what led him to explore the composable path. He explained that the two companies were operating on the same monolithic platform, so they thought integrating them into one system would be easy. After an unsuccessful attempt to launch the merged platform in June of 2022, it became evident to him that it wasn’t going to work out, then or ever.
Matt explained that not only was working within the rigid parameters of their monolithic platform difficult, but the costs of the specialized people required to run it along with the continual certification requirements, kept increasing. “It just wasn’t a good fit for our team. When you work on a monolithic platform, you've got to accept all of the decisions that all of the engineers from that company made, the languages they used to create it, and the patterns they implemented in their code. The complexity [of our site] was going up, and it was getting harder and harder.”
We need ways to maximize the resources we have. I think the CFO gets tired of me saying, ‘Hey, when can I have more resources?’ — ’Let’s find a way to succeed with the resources we have’ — That was really the driver for us [to switch to composable commerce].
Technical Product Manager, ACE Southern
ACE Southern signed a deal with commercetools in January 2023 and went live with its new composable system in July. "The improvement in our processes and performance has been significant,” said Matt. “They've enabled us to offer a personalized customer experience, which is our ultimate goal."
He acknowledged that the current industry perception of composable commerce is that it’s more complex to manage than a monolithic platform. He believes the problem is simply that it’s “new” — it’s not what people are used to. Since monoliths are a one-stop shop, Matt said, they naturally assume that the alternative, i.e. composable, means added complexity.
You look at it and say, ‘Oh, this is adding complexity. This is harder’. And for us, it was simpler.
Technical Product Manager, ACE Southern
He pointed out that it used to take weeks and weeks for his team to make a change or fix a bug, and he continually had to explain to business leaders why it took so long to accomplish a simple thing. “We’ve offloaded all that complexity to commercetools. Everything is an API now.”
In addition, being on the same cloud with commercetools is making things easier. “When something happens on the commercetools side, they can send messages to our queues which are already set up to process messages. Then, they just go into our normal workflow. Where we used to have three or four different workflows to get orders into our ERP, we’ve combined them into a single workflow.”
My team can focus on crafting customer experiences. Getting them what they need rather than dealing with, ‘What modules do we need to work with this system or that system?'
Technical Product Manager, ACE Southern
Since launching on commercetools, Matt’s team has utilized its capabilities to not only to increase the number of products available on the site but the amount of product information available to the customer as well. “Basically, overnight we were able to create the structure and hand it over to the product team.”
Ultimately, what ACE Southern wanted from their commerce system was a better and more performant customer experience, and this is exactly what they’ve recognized since they transitioned to composable commerce.
We're already seeing returns on the average order value size 2.5 times what we had previously. And a big part of that is just because we can create a better experience, we can get things out faster. Our team doesn't have to work within the confines of the monolith anymore.
Technical Product Manager, ACE Southern
To learn more about transitioning your B2B over to a composable commerce system, get the steps you need to follow and explore best practices, download our white paper, The Composable Commerce Migration Guide for B2B.
Anita J. Temple is the Corporate Journalist at commercetools. She was a fashion editor at Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) and W Magazine before launching a career as a freelance writer and creative producer. She has written content and worked on a wide range of marketing projects for companies including Dreamworks, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Verizon, and Adidas.