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Sonepar Runs Digital Factory With Bloomreach Discovery
Sonepar is an independent family-owned company with global market leadership in B2B distribution of electrical products, solutions, and related services. Headquartered in Paris, France Sonepar has a dense network of 100 brands spanning 40 countries. Drawing on the skill and passion of its 45,000 associates, Sonepar makes its customers’ lives easier over the counter, visiting customers, by phone, or online —however it is needed.
The Challenge
Sonepar is the market leader in its industry and set an ambitious goal to provide a fully digitized omnichannel experience across all operating companies. With digital transformation and customer experience a strong focus, Sonepar wanted to shift the way customers buy, increase its digital market share, and gain economies of scale.
With around ⅓ of total revenues coming from online sales, Sonepar was looking to replace multiple search solutions with one that would improve the customer experience and enable it to deliver on its growth goals.
The heart of our overall digital transformation is a Digital Factory. A cutting edge way of upgrading and modernizing our customers’ experiences, all while bringing the complete galaxy of Sonepar brands into a full omnichannel operating model. This, augmented by CRM capabilities, will propose a consistent and seamless experience to our customers, whether they come to us through a computer, a smartphone, or in a physical branch.
Philippe Delpech
CEO, Sonepar
The Solution
Sonepar could not achieve its digital vision as all of its companies were running as independent companies and using different technology stacks. It sought to standardize all of its companies’ technology stacks and build a new digital platform from the ground up, with search and product discovery as the “beating heart”.
A unified search tool across all of its brands, using algorithms backed by AI and machine learning without requiring more manual labor, would improve relevancy. With Bloomreach, a market-leading search experience would help Sonepar differentiate from competitors.
The Results
Bloomreach is at the heart of Sonepar accomplishing its mission. Bloomreach’s extensive B2B expertise led Sonepar to select Bloomreach Discovery — specifically the Search, Merchandising and Recommendations and Pathways capabilities.
One of the key decision drivers for selecting Bloomreach was the Merchandising dashboard, which allows each of the separate entities within Sonepar to manage its own experience. This enables the organization to have a centralized process for teams focusing on experience. Having a unified dashboard provided that capability.
Over the next five years, Sonepar will be rolling out its new technology stack to all of its companies around the world with Bloomreach providing a highly personalized product discovery experience.
