At 3Wire Group Inc., a supplier of parts for foodservice and beverage equipment, its e-commerce platform is seen as a crucial and central part of its customer-pleasing strategy. It provides parts that its customers use to upgrade and repair foodservice and beverage equipment—flexible tubing for soda dispensers, gas jets for ovens, and warming cabinets for cooked food, for example—and it often must fulfill orders immediately to keep its customers’ commercial kitchens and retail service counters running smoothly.

3Wire’s name is derived from the third wire from the start of the landing strip on an aircraft carrier designed to catch and stop landing planes. Pilots aim to catch the third wire with their plane’s tailhook in order to make the smoothest and safest landing. 3Wire, which is part of the Marmon/Berkshire Hathaway group of companies, wants its e-commerce site to live up to the company’s name, enhancing its image as a high-performance provider of parts and service at the exact time and place customers want them, says Jennie Stenback, vice president of marketing communications strategy and services.

3Wire, a part of the Marmon/Berkshire Hathaway group of companies, supplies hundreds of thousands of SKUs from some 750 original equipment manufacturers, and it often must fulfill complicated orders for foodservice chains that require multiple ship-to addresses and bill-to accounts. A procurement manager for a chain of bakeries, for example, may place an order for dozens of oven parts and request that 3Wire ship them to 20 bakery addresses, with split bills going to the store manager at each address.

Jennie Stenback,
vice president, 3Wire

But on its old website, it was difficult if not impossible to provide such service. 3Wire’s legacy website platform was “woefully out of date with old technology,” and at a crucial time when the company was adding more customized white-label sites for several of its key national clients, Stenback says.

“It was built on such an archaic platform that we couldn’t use the internet to drive channel penetration and brand awareness,” she says.

In the summer of 2015, 3Wire sent out a requests for proposals for e-commerce technology and services firms. It started out with CRC, a digital agency Stenback had worked with in past jobs. After considering a number of e-commerce platforms, it chose Insite Software. “We needed a robust, scalable and stable e-commerce engine,” and Insite fit the bill, she says.

But there was much work ahead, as 3Wire and its new team of website design and development partners began to sort through the processes of integrating a new Insite e-commerce platform with 3Wire’s enterprise resource planning system for managing customer orders, inventory levels and financial records.

“We had to understand our own spaghetti bowl and figure out how to unwind it,” Stenback says. Putting it another way, CRC, Insite and Xngage not only planned how the new e-commerce site would appear and function for customers, but also how it would integrate with back-end order management, shipping, inventory, financial and web security technology. In addition, 3Wire wanted to ensure that its sales reps and contact center service agents also had access to updated information on customer activity, order status, inventory levels and product pricing.

Insite and Xngage worked on the website and ERP integration to ensure that buyers at restaurant and other types of foodservice chains can not only place orders with multiple ship-to and bill-to addresses, but also instantly view the full price including shipping before clicking to buy.

Under the old website platform, customers were usually unable to view the complete cost of placing an order—resulting in lost business for 3Wire as customers in need of a quick replacement part went elsewhere. “We were losing customers who would go to other suppliers,” Stenback says. “Product availability and speed of order fulfillment is the name of the game in this business. That’s where we win.”

The new e-commerce platform, she adds, was crucial “for us to be on par with the competition.” Since rolling out the new platform in January, she notes, 3Wire has produced double-digit improvements across several customer metrics.

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