Symbex Companies

The challenge

Harmonizing e-commerce across five companies

Symbex is comprised of four different companies, each with a specialized line of materials or plastics products. Until 2019, Symbex didn’t have an e-commerce platform — they processed customer orders by phone and through email. Eventually, Symbex recognized that they needed an e-commerce solution to support further growth and to keep up with their competition.

Symbex had several key requirements for their B2B e-commerce platform. First, they needed it to integrate with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, their ERP system. Second, they needed it to be able to meet the specific demands of each of their companies. Because each company has slightly different business processes, their e-commerce solution needed to be able to accommodate each of them.

Beyond those two primary requirements, Symbex was looking for an affordable solution that is also customer user-friendly. They wanted a system that allows customers to easily view products, place orders, check their order history, and track their orders. Because they have only a small team, they needed to be able to update products, scale product lines, and maintain the web store quickly and easily.

Symbex undertook a rigorous search process to find the e-commerce platform that would best meet their needs. They evaluated several potential systems, including Magento and Pebblestone. But, after much consideration, these alternative products were considered to be too complex to use, hard to maintain, and too expensive. Eventually, Symbex chose Sana’s e-commerce solution because of its ease of use, ability to scale, and affordability.

The solution

SCC: Sana Commerce Cloud

Sana Commerce Cloud (SCC) is an e-commerce platform built to provide your businesses with a stable, sleek way to sell your products online. It has a number of features that make it the ideal solution for the complex need and ambitious goals of large enterprises.

SCC is the only e-commerce platform that has a native integration to your ERP system. That lets you avoid costly third-party integrations and makes it much easier to troubleshoot when there is an issue. With your web store built around your ERP system, SCC makes it easy to:

SCC is reliable. We guarantee 99.9% uptime and use load balancing, lazy loading, and more to ensure your web store runs smoothly.
SCC is lean. We centralize the SCC platform and tech stack around the tools you’re already using, so it forms a single, cohesive unit.
SCC is cost-effective. SCC eliminates unnecessary upgrade and implementation costs. You remove the costs of running a disconnected legacy system, and benefit from a high ROI.

SCC helps you to grow your business. It comes with built-in features that allow you to deliver personalized experiences to customers, maximizing opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. SCC gives your customers the convenient tools they need to check product information, verify contract terms, and track orders.

The process

Symbex fully implemented Sana using a small team in just four months

Sana was originally rolled out with only one of Symbex’s companies. It was built around the Microsoft Dynamics ERP system that Symbex used. Because it does not require any third-party integrations, Sana has significantly streamlined Symbex’s technology stack.

Symbex originally deployed Sana version 9.2 on a private, on-premise network in three to four months. However, to simplify their technical needs even further, Symbex plans to migrate to Sana Commerce Cloud—a cloud network hosted by Sana.
Symbex appreciates the scalability of the system. As Symbex moves to this new hosting arrangement, they will be able to scale Sana out to the other three companies. Part of the company’s long-term growth strategy is to acquire new complementary product lines. With SCC, it’s easy to create new pages for additional product lines as they acquire them.

Symbex implemented Sana largely with their own in-house technical resources, together with some collaboration by Sana’s implementation team, in under four months. That included building the few customizations that Symbex needed. Since SCC is so stable, Symbex has had little need to contact technical support. But when they have, they found Sana’s team of technical professionals to be responsive and collaborative.