Connecting Fragmented B2B Order Operations for a Global Healthcare Enterprise
From fragmented B2B order steps to a unified flow for quotes, orders, and customer validation.
Quick Insights
Client
The client is a global medical technology manufacturer serving healthcare organizations across multiple regions. Operating in a complex B2B environment, the company manages equipment sales that involve quote-based ordering scenarios, customer-specific validation, and country-specific ecommerce requirements.
Client Need
The client faced a fragmented B2B order process spread across multiple systems, teams, and manual steps. Discount-based ordering was still heavily dependent on offline interactions with sales representatives, while post-order customer validation and approval required business users to switch between external systems, emails, and separate interfaces. This made key order-related operations slower, less transparent, and more difficult to manage at scale.
The business needed to connect several disconnected B2B order operations into a more manageable, less manual, and more automated flow within the existing SAP Commerce ecosystem.
Technical Requirements
While addressing the client’s fragmented B2B order operations, the solution had to work within several technical constraints:
- Customer-facing checkout was implemented outside of SAP Commerce, while SAP Commerce itself served as an API layer and the system where orders were created and stored.
- SAP Commerce was not responsible for full order lifecycle orchestration, and its role was limited to creating a valid order and passing it downstream for further processing.
- Quote-based ordering had to extend the standard ecommerce flow to support discount request scenarios and smooth transition from quote approval to order confirmation.
- Country-specific rollout had to be handled as a cross-system change, including localized checkout behavior, product setup, and communication templates.
Given these constraints, the task went far beyond adding isolated ecommerce features. It required a more connected approach that linked quote handling, order creation, and post-order validation into a controlled flow while respecting the boundaries of SAP Commerce and the surrounding enterprise ecosystem.
Solution
As part of healthcare ecommerce development services, Expert Soft implemented a connected solution that linked quote handling, order creation, and post-order validation into a more unified flow within the client’s SAP Commerce ecosystem. The goal was not to replace existing platforms, but to reduce manual handoffs, introduce more automation where it mattered, and give both customers and business users a clearer path through critical order-related steps.
While the flow involved several interconnected stages, the core of the implementation was built around two areas: quote-driven ordering and post-order customer validation.
Quote-to-order digitization
To support discount-based ordering scenarios, the ecommerce flow was extended with a dedicated quote mechanism. Before the implementation, customers had to request discounts through a largely offline process involving multiple manual steps and back-and-forth communication with sales teams.
The new flow allowed customers to place orders directly on the ecommerce platform, while sales representatives could review and finalize quotes in an integrated system. Customers were then notified automatically, quote updates became visible in real time, and the transition from quote approval to order placement became much more seamless.
The quote flow included supporting capabilities that made it more practical in day-to-day use:
- automated email notifications throughout the quote lifecycle,
- reminder emails after inactivity, before expiration, and on the expiration day,
- real-time reflection of quote updates,
- archived access to original quotes for traceability,
- reporting for quotes and quote-related carts, including visibility into orders with and without quotes.
Stabilizing quotes across B2B access scenarios
In a B2B environment, quote handling must account for the fact that customer access is tied not only to individual users, but also to specific B2B units. This became especially important when customers opened quote links while already logged into the ecommerce platform: in some cases, the active session context did not match the B2B unit associated with the quote. As a result, quote conversion could fail, and customers were sometimes unable to complete checkout.
To address this, the quote-to-order logic was adjusted so that the quote itself defined the target customer and B2B unit, rather than relying on the currently active session context. This allowed quote links to be opened and processed consistently across different access scenarios and ensured more reliable quote conversion in the client’s B2B setup.
Post-order validation and approval
After an order was placed, some orders still required additional customer identification, KYC checks, and business approval before processing could continue. This was one of the key points where process continuity broke down, as the flow moved back into fragmented, partly manual operations.
Before this functionality was implemented, these steps were fragmented across multiple external systems, emails, and separate interfaces. Business users had to transfer data manually, track approvals outside the platform, and coordinate validation across disconnected tools. To reduce this operational complexity, the post-order flow was consolidated into SAP Commerce Backoffice, giving business users a single place to manage the required actions.
The new flow allowed users to open an order in Backoffice, request customer details, submit KYC data, receive validation feedback, and complete customer linking and approval within the same operational process. The UI was supported through Backoffice widgets that exchanged data and preserved intermediate state across multiple steps.
Customer validation through Reltio
A key part of the implementation was integration with Reltio, the third-party system responsible for customer validation. The flow was designed so that the initial request was sent synchronously and returned only a request identifier, while the full validation result arrived later through an asynchronous callback and was matched using that identifier.
This approach prevented long-running validation checks from blocking Backoffice actions and kept the workflow stable even when response times varied.
Delivery Challenges
Delivery complexity was shaped not only by the business logic itself, but also by factors outside the team’s direct control, including environment mismatches across connected systems, limited test-environment parity, and the constraints of real business-user access in SAP Commerce Backoffice.
Challenges
Results
Conclusion
By connecting previously fragmented B2B order operations into a more unified flow, Expert Soft helped the client reduce manual complexity across quote handling, order creation, and post-order validation. Automation, integration, and clearer operational logic made the process more manageable for business users, while SAP Commerce was used within the architectural boundaries to support a more practical and structured business workflow.
