As the manufacturing market rebounds from various challenges that impeded growth in 2023, digital transformation has emerged as a top priority for this sector. For instance, the report The Voice of Digital Leaders in Manufacturing 2024 revealed that 66% of manufacturers plan to invest in customer portals this year, a figure that’s up from 50% in comparison to the previous year.
The MACH Alliance Annual Survey of Global IT Decision-Makers echoes this sentiment, unveiling that, “The urgency to innovate is highest in the manufacturing industry, where 81% believe it is more urgent to innovate in 2024 than it has been in the past 5 years.”
Everywhere we turn, digital commerce for B2B boasts remarkable growth, with manufacturers modernizing their eCommerce infrastructure at an unprecedented pace. It’s clear that making the B2B sector digital is brimming with opportunity. What remains less clear, however, is how manufacturers can fully digitize commerce processes to meet the ever-evolving expectations of B2B buyers now and in the future.
The reality of B2B practitioners in the manufacturing industry reflects this divide. On one hand, executives understand they must invest in eCommerce channels, hybrid sales, and omnichannel experiences. However, the practical implementation is frequently hindered by a multitude of complexities. These range from managing multi-tiered distribution channels and meeting customer-specific demands to dealing with siloed data, a shortage of internal digital skills, and, unsurprisingly, outdated eCommerce technology.
According to Forrester Research, 65% of B2B sellers consider their eCommerce broken in their organizations. Even more concerning, 81% of surveyed respondents utilize an eCommerce platform that “lacks tools, can’t handle the complexity of products, collect customer data, or scale effectively.” In other words, most B2B organizations, particularly manufacturers, continue to rely on monolithic systems that lack the flexibility and scalability required to support the essential digital capabilities in such a dynamic market.
The Rise in Composable Implementations in B2B Manufacturing
The ability to adapt commerce is essential for addressing new business requirements, shifting buyer expectations and changing market conditions. In a world where unpredictability is the norm, flexibility and agility are not merely desirable features; they represent a winning strategy for businesses to succeed.
As the imperative to digitize sweeps through the manufacturing industry, there’s a distinct shift among B2B practitioners as they transition from viewing digitalization as a reactive measure to current challenges to embracing it as a proactive strategy for future success. Today, investing in digital maturity and agility is a paramount agenda for top executives in this sector as it enables them to navigate market volatility more effectively.
Composable commerce lies at the heart of such initiatives as it empowers businesses to modernize and adapt their tech stacks to address upcoming challenges and seize opportunities, from adopting predictive analytics to crafting an eCommerce strategy tailored for aftermarket spare parts.
There’s more: A key reason why manufacturers are embracing composable commerce is because it’s now much easier and faster to implement. What was once considered a sort of “Pandora’s box” by business and technology leaders, the myths of complexity surrounding composable commerce have been debunked as forward-thinking B2B manufacturers demonstrate the simplicity of their implementations and the fast time to value they achieved.
Two success stories perfectly bring this point home: ACE Southern and Orbia Wavin, both B2B manufacturers, have implemented composable commerce not only with a fast time to market but also very lean development resources.
ACE Southern, a prominent manufacturer and distributor in the oral surgery space, transitioned from Adobe Commerce to commercetools. This solution seamlessly integrates a separate PIM, ERP, frontend and a homegrown application for order management. The company utilized a system integrator for the implementation, in addition to employing one full-time developer, and accomplished a full migration in six months. The results couldn’t be more positive, as the manufacturer sees returns with an average order value size 2.5 times larger than before adopting commercetools.
Here’s another recently published story: A few years ago, the manufacturer of water-focused products and solutions Orbia Wavin was completely new to digital and decided to embark on its first digital commerce initiative as part of a global expansion strategy. Initially, Orbia Wavin created a pilot webshop for one of its core markets catering to merchants within eight months. The company expanded its digital footprint by launching 35 localized webshops across Europe, Latin America, and APAC at an average rate of 1.5 localized webshops per month over two years. Notably, Orbia Wavin engaged a system integrator and only two internal architects for its composable implementation, achieving a nine-digit turnover through digital channels in 2023.
Conclusion: B2B Manufacturers Will Shift to Composable Faster
As composable commerce continues to advance, it’s becoming increasingly easier and faster for B2B manufacturers to reap the benefits of this technology. Midmarket B2B companies in particular are driving this growth, as they recognize composability as a means to enhancing digital maturity, expanding commerce capabilities and capitalizing on new opportunities.
The rise of pre-composed solutions, such as commercetools Foundry, is poised to accelerate implementation and time to value. With a comprehensive blueprint, combined with pre-configured sets of components, features, best practices and launchpads, B2B manufacturers can create outstanding purchasing experiences while reducing time to market by 30%.
Moreover, the widespread availability of B2B-specific accelerators provides a shortcut to composable implementations as they cater to the specific needs of the manufacturing sector. Last but certainly not least, as Generative AI datasets mature with large language models (LLMs) trained on data, B2B companies can generate and debug code, which simplifies and expedites the adoption of composable technology.
There’s no doubt that the future of B2B digital commerce is bright: After all, Gartner predicts that a staggering 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels as early as 2025. With composable commerce, B2B manufacturers can lay the groundwork to seize this opportunity with ease and confidence.