A bit about Horizon
Horizon Global designs, manufactures and distributes high-quality, custom-engineered towing and trailer equipment across North America, Europe and Africa. Horizon is home to some of the most recognised brands in the industry including Witter Towbars (where our partnership began), Westfalia Automotive and Bulldog.
The challenge
Multiple global websites. Multiple ERPs. Multiple PIMs.
Horizon wanted to streamline all websites, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Product Information Management (PIM) systems to improve efficiencies and expand into new markets. These systems store everything from sales transactions and stock levels to internal processes and compliance information. They’re an essential part of the business, and need to work coherently to keep up with demand and scale.
The challenge was that Horizon operates worldwide using different ERPs and PIMs within each region. Plus, it used various ‘homegrown’ B2B websites for each region too – all with their own look, data set, functionality and agency looking after them (or in some cases, no one looking after them). This complexity and volume meant this wasn’t going to be easy. Good job we’re a website development agency that loves a challenge!
Solution
After scoping, research and workshops, we built one core system to bring all the disparate data together whilst leveraging economies of scale. We used a single code base because it makes creating, maintaining and integrating new websites for Horizon brands quick, easy and cost-efficient.
How? The new system standardises website functionality across all regions, so rolling out features can be done in a single deployment and creating new sites only means ‘re-skinning’ the front end. This enables Horizon to introduce new websites and reach audiences much faster than having to build new websites from scratch. This comes at a fraction of the cost and provides way better governance because Horizon’s global web team can easily manage access permissions and approval workflows.
To enhance functionality, we integrated all the various ERP and PIMs so all global stock levels now automatically come into the one core system, and all orders go out into each region’s individual ERP. Users can now view and manage orders across regions, and we built in a vehicle registration lookup service so they can easily find products specifically designed for their cars.
The rollout caused minimal disruption because it negated the need for Horizon’s internal teams to learn a new ERP – they continued with business as usual.
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