5 ways that Vincit CommerceAPI leads to better B2B commerce

Composable architecture has received a lot of attention lately – not only in its original B2C commerce domain but also more broadly in an enterprise and B2B context. In short, the idea of composable architecture is to “compose” digital solutions using fit-for-purpose, replaceable components that are based on the MACH concept: Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless.

In recent years, we’ve seen a massive rise in commerce engines, search engines, pricing solutions, personalization engines, storefronts, content management solutions, and huge investments from leading commerce suite providers to transform their architectures to support the composable paradigm. By using this approach, businesses can customize their commerce solutions to meet specific needs, scale efficiently, and integrate new technologies easily as they evolve.

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Example of a simplified B2C composable architecture

What composability means in B2B

In the B2B and enterprise context, “composability” in the backend systems has also gradually increased, with once monolith ERP systems being split into capabilities under best-of-breed systems – “core ERP”, CRM, CPQ, PIM, PLM, WMS, FSM, etc. This evolution has naturally increased the importance of system and process integration overall, but especially between the customer-facing and backend systems.

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Many of these backend solutions carry heavy technical debt and are in dire need of renewal or lengthy upgrades. For customer-facing solutions, they typically offer proprietary interfaces with a less-than-perfect performance and developer experience. Data quality and data models may be far from harmonized and ready to be exposed to customers and partners. Still, the reality is, that these systems are the backbone and veins of any enterprise – they run the core processes that are needed to “walk-the-talk” and deliver the promise made on customer-facing solutions.

Bridging the gap between customer-facing solutions and the backend

Traditional approaches for bridging the gap between customer-facing B2B solutions and legacy backend systems have failed – leading to poor customer experience due to bad performance or painful compromises in solution design, overly complex integrations and solution landscapes, long and costly development, and delayed value delivery due to complex dependencies between systems, development teams, and roadmaps. Even with one global ERP system to connect with from B2B commerce, this remains true.

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So, what can enterprises do differently today to effectively unleash the power of their backend capabilities to CX solutions and their customer’s needs? Harmonize their ERPs? Integrate systems with modern integration platforms? Deploy data solutions and harmonized analytics data models to the cloud? Invest in best-of-breed composable solutions with the best capabilities and modern APIs? While all this is surely beneficial, in most cases it’s just not enough.

Vincit’s solution

Our solution for this problem is a cloud-native service layer that exposes the core capabilities and data of the backend systems in a performant and harmonized way to any customer-facing or commercial solution. It encapsulates our extensive experience from the most demanding B2B commerce environments in a template that is adjusted to each customer’s unique environment. It bridges the gap between composable architecture and the realities of B2B business. We call it Vincit CommerceAPI.

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Typically, the essential capabilities and services of CommerceAPI are related to:

Customer-specific pricing, with complex ERP logic and large data volume
Business partner data of customers, value chain partners, and contacts
Financial data, with live credit status and payment terms and methods
Product data with product variants, replacing products and accessories
Product availability and scheduling, with complex rules of the supply chain
Delivery controls and freight pricing
Product-related documents, such as material certificates and drawings
Equipment data, with predictive condition monitoring and service history
Contracts with customer-specific products, terms and conditions
Order management, for complex rules of various scenarios such as contract call-off, finish-to-order, make-to-order, or consignment consumption
Order and delivery tracking, with real-time status and related documents
Invoice history, with access to invoice copies and payment status

The 5 main benefits of Vincit CommerceAPI

Firstly, the most important benefit of Vincit’s CommerceAPI is that it helps dramatically improve customer experience. As service designers and digital developers aren’t constrained by traditional performance and data bottlenecks, they can create feature-rich and superior customer experiences with zero surprises for the user. One good example is the ability to show customer-specific prices and live availability in the product search, without delay and the user having to navigate back and forth to find this out. Another example is the ability to show real-time order and delivery status in a complex supply network. These would be practically impossible to achieve with any traditional implementation methods.

Secondly, Vincit CommerceAPI improves developer productivity as the data is easily available for digital developers via modern APIs in an understandable and harmonized format – they do not have to learn “sapanese” or any other backend language or terminology. This greatly improves the speed and quality of development.

Thirdly, the system landscape can be simplified and major integration and maintenance costs saved. That’s because these kinds of commercial services are typically reused by other customer-facing solutions such as CRM, websites, mobile applications, or even by customers’ and partners’ procurement and commerce systems.

Fourthly, as CommerceAPI is intended also to be used to implement customer-specific enhancements as services, composable CX solutions can be kept “clean” from unnecessary modifications – thus enabling easier upgrades and keeping up to date with the latest innovations.

Finally, on a strategic level there is more flexibility. As the customer-facing solutions and backend systems are decoupled by using the layered architecture of CommerceAPI, the company CIO and CDO can plan and execute their roadmaps independently – like ERP transformation programs and customer portals – ensuring business agility and value delivery in all circumstances.

Want to find out how Vincit CommerceAPI can help transform your B2B offering? Contact us!