RS Components (http://www.rs-components.com), un distribuidor multinacional de componentes electrónicos e industriales, ha puesto en marcha recientemente un Portal B2B en 12 lenguas y con más de 300.000 productos en el catálogo. Ha utilizado el software de Broadvision.
NOTA DE PRENSA BROADVISION USA
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Sept. 4 /– BroadVision, Inc. today announced that RS Components, a major international distributor of electrical, electronic and industrial supplies based in the UK, is extending its internet trading channel to include 50 additional countries. By year’s end, the company’s BroadVision-powered portal framework will support nearly one million customers in 12 languages and 70 countries worldwide. E-commerce revenues for the year ended March 31, 2003 increased by 55 percent from the previous year to 79 million pounds sterling or 12.7 percent of total sales.
«The BroadVision platform has allowed us to develop once and roll out everywhere,» says Julian Wright, e-commerce marketing manager, RS Components. «We can slice and dice languages, content, functionality into new sites very easily now and each new site costs a very low five-figure sum. It’s this economy of scale that allows us to deploy a sophisticated B2B commerce portal developed for the 350 million pound UK market to smaller markets elsewhere in the world that turn over 2 million pounds a year.»
RS Components, a division of Electrocomponents plc, stocks over 300,000 products from 3,000 different suppliers and supplies products to over 1.5 million engineers. In the UK alone, RS Components processes 20,000 orders and delivers 25,000 parcels a day. Before the company launched its first commerce site, customers relied on a 5,000 page catalog or a static CD-ROM version of the catalog for product information. But the company was quick to recognize the potential of e-commerce. A BroadVision customer since 1997, RS Components has leveraged BroadVision’s full-service, self-service commerce application and advanced personalization capabilities to attract new and current customers to the online channel.
«A significant percentage of our e-commerce sales are incremental — ranging from 20 to 50 percent depending on the market,» says Wright. «It’s been a very good way of developing our existing customers, gaining new contacts within existing accounts and getting completely new customers. Japan is a nice example. Their online revenues grew 125 percent last year after we launched our BroadVision-powered portal in that market. And today over one-third of revenue in Japan comes from the online channel.»
As more and more customers gravitate to the online channel, RS Components has been able to cost effectively support growth while helping customers save time and money. For example:
— The six-volume product catalog takes six to nine months to update and
is expensive to produce and deliver. By making 300,000 products easy to
find and buy online, the company has been able to provide many more
customers access to their offer and made updating and introducing
products online almost instantaneous.
— By allowing customers to order online, RS Components has developed case
studies illustrating customer process savings of over 80 percent.
— Because of the technical nature of many of its products, RS Components
would send customers product specification sheets on request, costing
anywhere from 50p to #5. Today more than 69,000 technical data sheets
are available online. This has resulted in savings for RS Components
and allowed it to respond to three times as many requests.
«We congratulate RS Components on the dramatic expansion of their internet trading channel and the success of their current commerce sites,» says Warren Utt, senior vice president worldwide field operations, BroadVision. «Their decision to migrate to the latest version of our commerce application (7.1) is a great affirmation of our product and we are confident that it will carry them to many more e-commerce milestones in the months ahead.»
For more information about RS Components, visit http://www.rs.com (UK) and http://www.rs-components.com (RS worldwide).