Have you ever injured your shoulder, wrist, knee or ankle? If the answer is yes, then you’ve probably had an MRI scan provided by products from Siemens Healthineers, Dan Renda, the company’s head of global ecommerce, says. Siemens Healthineers is a medical imaging and laboratory diagnostics products manufacturer.

Dan Renda, head of global ecommerce, Siemens Healthineers

The increasing global demand for such products, he adds, coincides with the growth in the manufacturer’s ecommerce transactions. To maintain that kind of growth, Siemens Healthineers is continuing on a path to make it easier for its customers to purchase online — while dealing with challenges, Renda said in a general session presentation at the EnvisionB2B Conference & Exhibition last week.

Overall, elective surgeries declined in number during the COVID-19 pandemic, which hurt the imaging business, he said. Since then, business is back on track, and the company is focusing on its ecommerce strategy.

Siemens Healthineers sells products ranging from COVID tests to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines.  The company’s ecommerce sales primarily cover consumables. They include small laboratory instruments and chemicals used with its complex medical imaging and laboratory diagnostics machines. Additionally, Siemens also sells service contracts, warranties, education, training and certification materials online.

“A lot of our ecommerce revenue comes from smaller products” that support the machinery/testing processes, Renda said. “It’s these smaller products that are a high-volume type of business.”

Keep it simple

But, while enabling customers to buy online, Renda cautions against offering an overabundance of tools.

“It’s really looking to what makes the most sense and ‘why do I want to receive this particular market?’” Renda said.

The majority of Siemens Healthineers’ ecommerce platform revenue is coming from customer purchases transacted through SAP Hybris. It’s an ecommerce platform that business software provider SAP has used as the core of its Commerce Cloud ecommerce software.

Dan Renda, left, sifts with Digital Commerce 360 B2B editor Paul Demery.

“We have a very deep integration with SAP on the back end,” Renda said, referring to enterprise resource planning software. “And we can offer the customer a very tightly integrated process where we are getting the dynamic pricing from the back end to your environment.

“We can show the customer all their orders placed offline or online, and we have the ability to allow the customer to check the status,” he said.

Making ecommerce as ‘frictionless as possible’

Renda noted that, ideally, the less involvement needed from the IT department, the better. Especially when entering new markets with ecommerce, it may deploy a lighter version of its ecommerce software to test the market without integrating with an enterprise resource planning system, then connect to the ERP if the company decides the market is worth developing.

“If that site gains traction, it’s a great way to justify an investment or further level of integration,” he said.

Siemens Healthineers recently rolled out the Spryker marketplace software suite as part of its ecommerce offerings. The goal is to make the ecommerce experience as frictionless as possible, Renda said.

In addition, Siemens Healthineers wants to make it easier for its biggest customers to place online orders.

Large customers “don’t want to have to log onto our web shop,” Renda said. “One of the things we’ve done is give the customer the ability to create an order template. This can be created from prior orders. It’s just a list of commonly ordered products/materials that have been taken by this particular user.”

Saving over 60,000 hours of manual tasks

Also, Renda said customers can maintain standing orders using scheduling and payment options.

“So, they might say, every 30 days, just send me these quantities,” Renda said. “And they know it’ll show up on their doorstep.”

Online order flow efficiencies result in savings, Renda said.

“We can document, a conservative estimate, that globally we’ve saved over 60,000 hours of manual effort,” Renda said. “That’s one way to look at return on investment.”

Without rekeying orders, Renda says, Siemens Healthineers can have a better degree of care quality.

“The customer can see the status that comes from contract delivery orders,” Renda said. “There’s an element of customer satisfaction that’s affordable.”

Hospitals are a main customer segment for the company, and many of their purchases are not suited for online transactions, Renda said. Moreover, a customer’s purchase transaction for large, high-ticket products like MRI machines is typically conducted with the help of consultants and engineers alongside Healthineers’ sales team.

“But we want to move into a world where there is more of that buyer journey” online, he said.

One goal for now is to help customers plan equipment configurations online.

“We want to do a better job on our part to keep track of where our customers are — wherever they are — and really have a more cohesive online life,” he said.

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