Normet Customer Story

How Normet dug deep to unearth its new eCommerce solution

Backed by over 60 years of experience, Normet is a B2B technology company that offers services for underground mining and tunneling projects, including providing complex machinery, spare parts, rental equipment, equipment refurbishment, and performance and field services. By working closely with its customers, Normet has amassed significant expertise from being involved with thousands of mining and tunneling projects from all over (and under) the globe. Helping customers build the safest places underground is the bedrock of the company vision. Normet does so by helping their mining and tunneling partners continually refine their processes, increase the safety and productivity of their underground activities and improve the sustainability of their operations.

Revenue

380 Million USD
Markets

33
Headquarters

Espoo, Finland
Industry

Manufacturing
Business Model

B2B
Worked with Partners
- Columbus
- Contentful

months to deployment

SKUs digitized

commerce APIs

The Challenge

Within Normet's rolodex are customers that have had relationships with the company going back decades. During the purchasing phase, those relationships generally consisted of person-to-person interactions between sales reps and clients. Phone calls and emails were the primary choice for taking orders, but this was time-consuming and inefficient.

Normet's product catalog includes 65,000 spare parts, which are highly specialized. Customers had limited tools and visibility to the entire spare parts catalog, and receiving availability and price information had been a time-consuming, mostly manual process. To make its customers' lives easier, Normet knew that it needed to digitally transform its manual processes and create a solution for existing customers to easily use since they are often physically in the field — as well as attract new clients.

The Solution

Normet strives to put its customers first by delivering the best digital experiences and processes for them. This aspiration led Normet to identify that customers wanted automation during the purchasing phase, which took the company straight to commercetools' door; with best-in-class tools in digital commerce provided by commercetools, Normet could automate not only customer-facing processes, but internal ones as well.

Additionally, Normet decided on a MACH™ approach for its flexibility early on. commercetools, again, emerged as the top choice due to being the founder of MACH, as well as having a better partner ecosystem than other vendors.

You need to have the agility to adapt to your changing requirements and needs. I believe that the MACH approach suits that quite well. If we are thinking about 2…3…4 years into the future, we need to be prepared in case something changes, for example, in customer behavior or connecting to IoT. If we would have built the system with a traditional monolith eCommerce system, we would have lost that agility for the future. This is why we chose composable architecture.

Pekka Jaarinen

Director of Digital Services, Normet

Why it was a success

With Normet's catalog of spare parts going fully digital, the company now has the opportunity to upsell and cross-sell products by promoting other value-adding accessories. Customers can now make different types of purchases easily, as well as check the availability and pricing for single products quickly.

Normet's implementation process with partner Columbus Global — from the first line of code to full production deployment — took only 4.5 months (and was kept within budget!) And, after onboarding, customers started using the eCommerce portal immediately. With customers ordering online, sales teams have greatly improved efficiency as they can focus on more valuable tasks. Normet is also actively collecting customer feedback to iteratively develop new features so that its commerce solution is perfectly molded to customer needs.