Frénéhard & Michaux launches its new international B2B e-commerce digital platform. What is the group's ambition? What are its challenges? And how did Smile lead this large-scale digital transformation project?
A leading industrial manufacturer of fall protection and access equipment, the Frénéhard & Michaux Group has reached a major strategic milestone in its digital transformation. With the strategic and technical support of the Smile teams, the group announces the official launch of its new international B2B e-commerce digital platform, inaugurated with the go-live of its pilot brand Tubesca-Comabi .
A strong ambition: to modernize and unify the B2B experience
Faced with an aging and fragmented web ecosystem (including a legacy site based on an outdated version of Drupal), the Frénéhard & Michaux Group wanted to simplify the purchasing process for its network of partner distributors. The objective was clear: eliminate manual order entry for internal teams and offer a unified and scalable platform in the form of a Core Model, capable of rapidly expanding to all of the group's brands (Artub, Frénéhard).
A modular and best-of-breed architecture resolutely focused on the future
To meet this ambition for agility and performance, Smile designed a modern, decoupled (headless) and API-first architecture. At the heart of the transactional system is commercetools , the cloud-native SaaS e-commerce platform renowned for its flexibility.
Around this robust foundation is structured an ecosystem of leading solutions:
- Strapi PaaS: a modern headless CMS that offers marketing teams complete autonomy in editing and creating landing pages without involving the IT department.
- Algolia: an ultra-high-performance and personalized search engine, indexing enriched product data from the Akeneo PIM as well as CMS content.
- Click2Buy: to facilitate omnichannel redirection and conversion.
- Microsoft Azure & Alter Way : a secure cloud infrastructure on Azure, brilliantly hosted and managed by Alter Way (a specialized brand of the Smile group).
An iconic Core Model project for Smile
This deployment marks a significant milestone for Smile: it's our first large-scale project implemented using commercetools technology . It showcases the expertise of our e-commerce architecture and consulting teams in orchestrating complex "best-of-breed" ecosystems. Delivered using an agile methodology with short, two-week sprint cycles, the entire build was completed in less than six months .
Concrete, everyday business benefits
Thanks to this new customizable platform, the Frénéhard & Michaux Group offers its distributor clients a seamless and highly personalized experience:
- Hot real-time data: instant consultation of available stocks and dynamic calculation of discounted price lists based on the customer account.
- Smooth purchasing experience: ultra-fast navigation and a frictionless automated ordering process.
- Total editorial autonomy: agile marketing management and responsive e-merchandising managed directly by the business teams.
The platform now constitutes an industrialized Core Model foundation, ready to be deployed on the group's other international brands and subsidiaries.
