Parker Hannifin Corp. specializes in manufacturing hydraulic and pneumatic components used in products ranging from aircraft wheel assemblies to refrigeration units and industrial pumps and motors. To help its worldwide customers better find and purchase items across its divisions and international markets, it’s rolling out a new e-commerce and order management system.
“This is not a technology project; it’s what our customers want online,” Bob McAdoo, vice president of worldwide business systems, said at IBM Corp.’s Amplify e-commerce technology conference in San Diego last week
Parker Hannifin makes about 900,000 discrete SKUs—a number that grows much larger when including configured products made up of multiple SKUs—and organizes them among more than 6,000 product lines. Its product lines—including items like valves, pumps, filters, hoses and seals—are available in multiple versions from across the company’s 85 manufacturing divisions.
Each of those divisions makes its products available through Parker Hannifin’s network of 52 international web sites, where customers can request a price quote from the pertinent division and select a distributor. Now the company is also coming out with an online shopping cart and order management system designed to let customers place orders online from multiple divisions.
“This lets us show products from all of our divisions in a single cart,” said Alan Gaffney, director of global e-business, who along with McAdoo spoke about Parker Hannifin’s e-commerce plans during an Amplify conference presentation. The company is deploying IBM technology including WebSphere Commerce for its online shopping cart and IBM Sterling Distributed Order Management for routing orders to the most appropriate distributor.
The WebSphere Commerce software provides common e-commerce software for all 52 international sites, each of which will be modified for local content. To start out, Parker Hannifin is piloting the new e-commerce site this year with about 25 distributors serving its customers in the United States.
Parker Hannifin’s biggest challenge in going forward with an online shopping cart, McAdoo said, was in avoiding channel conflict with its more than 8,000 distributors worldwide. “The worst thing would be to sell direct to customers, and lose credibility with our distributors,” he said, noting that the company has had relationships with many of them for decades.
The new shopping cart addresses that by forwarding each online order to a distributor, with the distributor selected by the order management system based on a distributor’s product availability and proximity to the customer. If a customer orders multiple products from multiple distributors, “we show by line item which distributor fulfills the order,” Gaffney said.
As customers used their commercial credit cards or other financial tools to make online payments, Parker Hannifin will forward the funds to each distributor minus a commission.
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