Johnson & Johnson measures the success of its B2B e-commerce strategy in terms of how satisfied customers are in their ability to easily and quickly order the right products, says Stacy Cashman, director of the E-capability/E-commerce Global Program.

That’s why the company—with $74.3 billion in 2014 worldwide sales—is moving ahead with a business-to-business e-commerce strategy to make ordering from among its more than 200,000 SKUs easier for customers regardless of size or location, Cashman says.

Johnson & Johnson is already benefitting from a network of B2B e-commerce portals that are helping to drive sales from retailers in such areas as Latin America, where many buyers don’t have access to the electronic data interchange, or EDI, systems more common among Johnson & Johnson’s large U.S.-based customers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp. Even these large EDI customers also benefit from J&J’s B2B portals, which they use to check EDI order status, Cashman says. EDI is a system that lets suppliers and buyers exchange such electronic documents as purchase orders, invoices and shipment notices over private networks.

But J&J wants to make its online B2B portals more useful to customers, including its EDI clients, Cashman says.

Cashman and Tejal Raoof, Johnson &  Johnson’s program lead for its e-commerce technology, described at a recent hybris Software technology conference the steps the manufacturer of medical devices, pharmaceuticals and over-the-counter retail pharmacy products like Tylenol pain killers and Band-Aid bandages is taking to renew its global e-commerce infrastructure. The project is part of a multi-year plan to upgrade and consolidate the company’s widely dispersed network of enterprise resource planning, or ERP, systems and B2B e-commerce websites. ERP systems include business applications for managing such operations as inventory, customer records and financial accounting; they typically integrate with e-commerce sites to for updating customer, financial and inventory records as customers place online orders.

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Johnson & Johnson is working with SAP SE, its provider of ERP technology, to consolidate its global ERP systems as a precursor to implementing a global e-commerce technology platform from hybris Software, Cashman said. Hybris, which is owned by SAP, is often deployed as e-commerce software on top of SAP’s ERP technology.

As it moves ahead with these projects, J&J is striving to streamline its technology and website design while making its e-commerce sites easier to use, Cashman said. The company, for example, is exploring how its e-commerce technology can better provide the online content and buying features important to customers in each market, such as by providing enough product details in local languages to reduce customers’ need to contact J&J’s customer contact center.

Cashman did not comment on J&J’s volume of e-commerce sales or whether the company had set a goal for reaching a certain percentage of sales processed online. Instead of measuring online sales performance as a percentage of total revenue, the company will monitor and analyze the feedback it gets from customers regarding how J&J is helping them more easily do their purchasing jobs, she said. “When we can count how many smiley faces we get, that will be a metric,” she said.

Johnson & Johnson is No. 64 in the newly published B2B E-Commerce 300, which lists companies by their annual B2B online sales.

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