Discover how H+K's global modernization journey, enhancing customer experience and optimizing order management, led to a major boost in sales while simultaneously reducing operating costs.
When it comes to manufacturing and supplying top-tier kitchen equipment for the food service industry, H+K International is a household name. Founded in Canada in 1975, they've grown exponentially, now having a significant global presence in the UK, US, China, Ireland, Mexico, and Australia. H+K appliances are found in restaurant chains such as McDonald's, Subway, and hundreds of others.
For 12 years, Icreon has been H+K's trusted partner, providing innovative digital solutions that have streamlined operations, accelerated their online shopping program, enabled more efficient order management for employees, and ultimately fueled H+K's growth.
The Challenge: Updating Legacy Systems and Enhancing Customer Service
H+K International had an outdated ordering process that was slowing their ability to grow. Despite having online ordering available, their outdated online ordering experience and legacy ERP system was causing the majority of their clients to make orders over the phone. The company decided to enhance their online ordering process and overall digital experience to encourage customers to make online orders. After a competitive RFP, Icreon emerged as their digital partner.
The Solution: Building an Enterprise Omnichannel Retail Experience
To overcome these challenges, H+K collaborated with Icreon. Icreon’s team worked closely with H+K to modernize the outdated ERP system, which contained huge volumes of product data, with the latest tech stack. This massive database migration helped the company run their backend operations flawlessly. Along with scaling the capacity of the underlying backend system with new technology upgrades, Icreon developed a web-based enterprise solution that allowed H+K staff to manage clients, maintain product catalogs, manage inventory, and process orders received more efficiently than ever before. Icreon provided H+K with the right digital tools and custom automations in areas like freight management, enabling them to process orders faster, with less steps, and an improved accuracy of orders delivery.
Simultaneously, Icreon expanded H+K’s digital capabilties by creating an online storfront, which is available in 9 languages, enabling them to extend and respond to the increased demand. The digital storefront was equipped with a comprehensive reporting engine, offering H+K better insights into their products and client behavior. Icreon helped H+K transition to multiple payment solutions and introduced recurring orders, that triggered personalized messaging making it easier for clients to reorder and increased sales.
Leveraging machine learning, the b2b ecommerce website enhanced product search accuracy, delivered personalized user experiences, and introduced a user-friendly one-click quick order feature.
The Result: H+K's Remarkable Operational Improvement and Enhanced Shopping Experience
Icreon transformed H+K International's outdated ERP system and built an online storefront to improve the ordering process and driving a significant increase in online orders. With enhanced user-friendliness and a streamlined digital experience, customers now prefer online orders which resulting in reduced operating costs and an significant increase in incremental revenue.
The Challenge: Beyond WiFi: Streamlining Online Orders in a Diverse Digital Landscape
H+K International was confronted with another obstacle.
A considerable number of H+K’s retail locations not only lacked WiFi, but also lacked access to an online portal where employees could place orders for customers. This lack of a digital expereince for customers visiting H+K’s retail locations resulted in missed sales and lost revenue. H+K saw this as a chance to unlock new revenue. To overcome these challenges, they wanted to provide an order portal for retail employees, ensuring that all their stores could place customer orders quickly and efficiently. They also wanted to optimize the mobile experience for customers visting thier retail locations, helping customers understand thier solutions, make buying decisions, and easily place orders. This vision lead to an omni-channel experience, enabling customers to transition seamlessly between web experiences and moble apps and different devices, from desktop to mobile to tablet, without loosing thier personalized customer journeys or shooping cart information.
The Solution: Delivering Seamless Mobile Ordering Experiences
To achieve these ambitious goals, H+K partnered with Icreon to develop a seamless mobile ordering experience. Acknowledging the global variations in smartphone and tablet usage, as well as differing download speeds across stores, Icreon engineered robust and high-performing mobile and tablet apps capable of delivering optimal performance even on lower cellular connections like 3G and Lite. The collaboration led to a user-friendly, efficient, and accessible platform that enables H+K's client store users to place, reorder, or add parts to an exsiting order with just a few taps.
On the digital business optimization front, Icreon utilized advanced APIs to construct a seamless data exchange between the newly developed mobile apps and H+K's robust enterprise system. This step was critical, as it fostered an environment of interconnectedness that directly translated to streamlined operations. The integration simplified the ordering process, making it smoother and more efficient. In essence, it was the digital equivalent of greasing the gears, ensuring that all interal operations moved in harmony to enhance user experience. Regular maintenance and updates are carried out on these native apps, ensuring they remain up-to-date with the backend system and providing users with the best possible ordering experience.
The Result: Enhanced Customer Experience and Business Growth
The implementation of this solution brought significant improvements. Not only did it extend online ordering capabilities to all stores, but it also streamlined the ordering process, resulting in quicker and more efficient transactions. Introducing the omni-channel experience ensured customers could switch between devices seamlessly without loosing thier personalized experience. Since the implementation of the new solution, hundreds of thousands customers are now using smartphones and tablets for their online orders. This drove a 50% increase in online orders.
Icreon initiated the modernization of H+K's legacy systems with a comprehensive enterprise architecture strategy. This strategy aimed to streamline operations and set the stage for a web-based enterprise solution. This solution optimized client management, product cataloging, inventory control, and order processing.
Icreon crafted a sophisticated, web-based enterprise solution to optimize product catalog management, inventory tracking, and order processing. This innovation streamlined H+K's internal backend operations, ensuring faster, more accurate online order processing.
Icreon expanded H+K's digital capabilities by creating a multilingual online storefront to accomodate increased customer demand. It included a robust reporting engine, multiple payment methods, recurring orders and machine learning-powered product searches, simplifying and improving the shopping experience.
Icreon developed robust, high-performing mobile and tablet apps that enabled H+K's client store users to order or reorder parts swiftly and efficiently, even under lower cellular connections. This development was fortified with advanced APIs, ensuring seamless data exchange between the apps and H+K's enterprise system, thus enhancing the overall user experience.
Icreon drove H+K's customer experience transformation with an innovative solution integrating machine learning and APIs. This ensured seamless, personalized user experiences with enhanced accuracy and speed in ordering. A robust reporting engine provided valuable insights into product performance and customer behavior, ultimately improving customer service, operational efficiency, and paving the way for future growth.
Icreon introduced personalized recommendations for H+K, using advanced analytics and machine learning for a highly tailored shopping experience. By analyzing past behaviors and real-time interactions, the system recommended relevant products, boosting customer satisfaction, sales, and loyalty. Additionally, 1-click quick ordering through Exploded Views was facilitated.
