Prologue

In 2015, I led a project to define a digital strategy for ORS Nasco, Essendant’s industrial business, in partnership with West Monroe Partners. We conducted exploratory research to answer fundamental questions our stakeholders had about the best ways to serve industrial resellers, identified and prioritized several digital initiatives, including tight integration with leading procurement solutions, digital selling tools, and a redesigned website, and delivered an ROI model to assist Essendant’s leadership team in prioritizing their investment in each.

The Challenge

In the summer of 2016, Essendant revisited the digital strategy we'd recommended for ORS Nasco, and determined that they would move forward with a new website for their industrial arm, independent of Essendant's other businesses.

The project included software selection to support a minimal set of requirements, vendor selection for implementation of any needed customizations, as well as a customized user experience and look and feel, and user experience and graphic design work to meet the revised requirements and apply user interface best practices to the selected software.   

Software Selection

To select the best software solution for the project, I reduced our initial selection criteria to minimal requirements plus features supported by the current solution, then led the selection process, comparing out-of-box features, implementation and customization costs, data migration costs, hosting and maintenance costs, and time to market.  Because ORS Nasco would continue use of Infor SX.e for order management, we considered three possible solutions: Insite Commerce, a custom solution built for Medco (Essendant's automotive business) with Able Commerce as a foundation, and Infor Storefront plus Progress EasyAsk search. We selected Infor Storefront plus EasyAsk.

UX and Graphic Design Treatment

Before

The old ORS Nasco website was a slightly-customized older version of Infor Storefront. The interface was outdated, didn't support mobile devices, and its search capabilities were weak (due to data quality and the capabilities of Storefront's native search engine).

The out-of-box experience for the newer version of Storefront didn't differ that much from the older version, but we recommended significant customization to support a more modern, responsive interface. With the implementation of EasyAsk, we'd also be able to support a much more robust search capability, including attribute filters (the content team also spent time cleaning up data for top products as part of this initiative). The branding for the new site is based on branding completed in 2013 for the ORS Nasco website. I modified it to bring it up to date, then expanded on it to support the new site's E-commerce capabilities.

After

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Product Details

Biggest Industrial Book

ORS Nasco also hosts a public-facing, generically branded site called Biggest Industrial Book, used by its resellers that don't have E-commerce sites to share products with their customers. Upgrading the ORS Nasco website required upgrading Biggest Industrial Book as well.  The branding for this site was based on the branding for Essendant's Biggest Book.