Manufacturers

You build the product, and the product has options. A welding torch that exists in fourteen torch lengths, six current ratings and three cooling variants is not one product with a dropdown. It is several hundred sellable things, each with its own weight, its own lead time and its own price. The printed catalog cannot hold that, which is why so much of the range still reads price on request, and why the buyer phones. A day of Innendienst time disappears into a handful of orders the customer could have placed themselves.

Between you and the person who runs the machine there is usually someone else: a dealer, a system integrator, or an OEM customer's purchasing department. So your digital channel is never one journey. The Tier-1 buyer wants to punch out of their own procurement system into your catalog and never see your website. The dealer wants their tier price and your stock figure, and wants to be sure you are not underselling them to their own customer. The maintenance engineer wants the seal for a machine you shipped eleven years ago, today, and knows the machine number rather than the article number. One catalog, three different paths through it.

What is different about your business

A price exists only once a specification does. For a large part of your range, "what does it cost" has no answer until length, material, coating and connection are settled. Everything else on this page depends on how you model that: as a family of real, orderable variants with their own article numbers, or as a configuration priced from rules. Get the modelling wrong and every later fix means touching products that already carry order history.

Your installed base is an asset, and it is usually undocumented. Machines you shipped a decade ago are still running, and the as-built bill of material rarely matches the as-designed one. Whoever can answer "what is inside machine 4711 and what fits it" gets the spare-part order. Today that answer usually lives in one service technician's head.

Your conditions live in the ERP, not in a price list. A customer-material condition, a customer-group discount, a scale that starts at 250 pieces, a promotional condition with a validity date. The shop has to reproduce that stack faithfully, per customer, as the page renders. This is where manufacturer projects overrun. The storefront is the cheap part.

Your largest customers will never visit your shop. Their purchasing is mandated into Ariba, Coupa or SAP SRM, and they will ask for OCI or cXML by name. A supplier who cannot answer that request within weeks drops off the approved vendor list, and getting back on takes a procurement cycle.

You have a channel you must not damage. The moment a direct price is visible online, it becomes the ceiling for every dealer negotiation. That is a commercial decision with a technical consequence: assortment, pricing and visibility have to be steerable per audience before you publish anything.

Your product data is engineering data. Data sheets, drawings, tolerance tables, CAD. Accurate, and written for engineers. OEM customers will also ask for your catalog in their classification (ECLASS or ETIM) and their exchange format. That is a data-model question, not a translation job.

Your path

Phase 1: Make the product data carry the specification

Nothing else works until the catalog knows what your products are. This is also the phase you can run without touching a customer.

1. Publish a digital product catalog: the goal page for this phase.
2. How product information management works
3. Plan your data model
4. Attributes and attribute groups and Families
5. Variants and family variants: the decision that defines this phase.
6. Measurements and units and Assets and asset families
7. If OEM customers already ask for it: Classification standards and Map attributes to a classification.

Phase 2: Spare parts before new equipment

Spare parts are the right second phase for a manufacturer. The demand is urgent, so buyers tolerate a young shop. There is little channel conflict, because dealers rarely want to stock the slow-moving tail. And building it forces the BOM discipline and the ERP connection that Phase 3 depends on anyway.

1. Sell spare parts online: the goal page for this phase.
2. How buyers identify a spare part
3. Bills of material and assemblies → Model a bill of material
4. Exploded drawings and hotspots and The customer's installed base
5. Connect your ERP → Where your prices come from → Contract prices for a customer
6. Stock, locations and availability
7. The buyer's path: find a spare part: read this last, as the acceptance test.

Phase 3: The demanding journeys

Now take on the three that carry real revenue, in whichever order your customers are asking for them.

1. Sell configurable products → Configurable products → Build a configurator → Compatibility and fits-with → The buyer's path: configure and order
2. Connect via punchout → Punchout explained → Set up a punchout
3. Sell through marketplaces and channels → Segments → Design your price lists → Create a storefront for a dealer portal.
4. Where the specification still needs an engineer: Run quote-to-order.

The mistakes we see most in your industry

• Building the configurator first, because it demos well. It is the hardest thing on the list, it depends on catalog and pricing work that has not been done, and it is the one part of the project where a wrong answer produces an unbuildable order.
• Modelling variants as separate standalone products. It looks quicker in week two. It splits order history, breaks navigation, and the correction later means merging products that customers have already ordered.
• Publishing a direct price without deciding what it means for the dealer. Decide the channel rules (assortment, price, delivery) before the first page is public. Retracting a price your dealers have already seen costs more than delaying it.
• Treating spare parts as a subset of the main catalog. A buyer with a machine down does not browse a product family. Without a drawing, a machine or serial number entry point, and a compatibility answer, the shop is slower than phoning your service desk.
• Agreeing to punchout before seeing what the customer's system sends. OCI and cXML are not interchangeable, and the mapping of unit of measure, price basis and article number is where these connections fail. Ask for a test session early.

What to measure

• Share of price on request in the published assortment. The clearest single indicator of Phase 1 progress. It should trend to zero for stocked articles.
• Spare-part order lines placed without contact with your service desk, per month, and the share of spare-part revenue arriving that way.
• Identification success: sessions that start from a machine or serial number and end in a cart. If this is weak, the installed-base data is the problem, not the search.
• Configurations completed to a price without a human, against configurations abandoned. Look at where in the option tree they stop. That is your rule set telling you which constraint is wrong.
• Punchout sessions per OEM customer, and the share that return a cart. A customer punching in and leaving empty has hit a data or price problem, and they will not report it.
• Dealer online share, per dealer. Watch the distribution, not the average. Dealers convert one at a time, like any other account.
• Order lines the Innendienst retyped from an email or a call, categorised by reason. It tells you which of the three journeys above to build next.

Where to start reading

1. Variants and family variants: the decision everything else in your catalog inherits.
2. Sell spare parts online: the phase that usually pays for the project.
3. Where your prices come from: before anyone promises the shop will "get prices from SAP".

What you're building

One catalog that knows what your products are, down to the variant and the part inside the assembly. Three audiences reach it by three routes: your own storefront for end customers and the service technician, a dealer portal with dealer conditions, and a punchout channel that runs inside an OEM customer's procurement system. Prices and stock come from the ERP; orders go back to it with the specification attached.

flowchart LR
  ERP["Your ERP / PLM"]
  PROC["OEM procurement system (OCI / cXML)"]
  subgraph CS["Commerce Studio"]
    P["Products: families, variants, assemblies"]
    PR["Price lists and contract prices"]
    C["Organizations: dealers, OEMs, end customers"]
    CH["Channels: shop, dealer portal, punchout"]
    O["Orders with specification"]
  end
  subgraph IS["Integration Studio"]
    WF["Workflows and mapping"]
  end
  subgraph XS["Experience Studio"]
    SF["Storefront and dealer portal"]
  end
  ERP -- "article master, BOMs, conditions, stock" --> WF
  WF --> P
  WF --> PR
  PROC -- "punchout session" --> CH
  CH --> SF
  SF -- "cart" --> O
  O -- "order, options as data" --> WF
  WF --> ERP
  CFG["Configurator UI (planned)"]:::planned
  CFG -.-> SF
  SP["Spare-part identification (planned)"]:::planned
  SP -.-> SF
  classDef planned stroke-dasharray: 5 5

What you need

• A decision, per family, whether the options are variants or a configuration — Variants and family variants
• Families, attributes and measurement units that carry the specification — Plan your data model
• At least one bill of material out of engineering in a structure you can load — Bills of material and assemblies
• Customer conditions readable from the ERP at the moment the page renders — Where your prices come from
• Dealers, OEMs and end customers as organizations in segments, so assortment and price can differ per audience — Organizations · Segments
• A channel policy signed off by sales: what a dealer sees, what an end customer sees, what is public — Design your price lists
• An ERP connection for orders out, stock in and prices in — Connect a system
• Classification mapped once, if OEM customers require ECLASS or ETIM — Map attributes to a classification

Build it

1. Decide variants or configurator for every family, and write the reason down — Variants and family variants
2. Model families, attributes, measurements and the reference entities for series and machines — Plan your data model
3. Load one family by hand to 100 % for the web channel, then import the rest — Create a product · Import products in bulk
4. Publish the catalog without prices, and start the weekly maintenance routine — Publish a digital product catalog
5. Connect the ERP: orders out first, then stock, then conditions — Connect your ERP
6. Load contract prices for ten pilot customers and check what each of them sees — Check which price a buyer sees
7. Model the BOM for the one series that generates the most identification calls — Model a bill of material
8. Open the spare-parts shop for that series, with drawings and successor chains — Sell spare parts online
9. Settle the dealer rules, then set up the dealer price list, the dealer segment and the dealer storefront — Create a storefront
10. Connect the first OEM customer via punchout: their prices and assortment first, the protocol second — Set up a punchout
11. Write down the configuration rules for the family with the most specification calls, and route those requests to a quote until the configurator surface ships — Build a configurator
12. Put the quote path in place for everything the rules will not price — Automate quote-to-order
13. Report each journey on its own line: spare parts, dealer, punchout, configured — Dashboards and KPIs

Decisions you'll need to make

Related product areas

• Commerce Studio — Products · Families · Family variants · Attributes · References · Price lists · Organizations · Segments · Channels · Orders
• Experience Studio — Sites · Pages · Domains
• Integration Studio — Credentials · Workflows · Field mapping · Import export