As a worldwide leader in specialty chemical manufacturing, Greenfield Global is no stranger to growth. Since launching in 1989, the company has developed a portfolio of over 1,600 mission-critical materials and specialty ingredients for products such as distilled spirits and personal care items.

Pre-pandemic, Greenfield decided to transition its former commerce site to a new, dynamic platform to build a foundation for the company’s continued expansion. Coincidentally, around the same time of this transition, the pandemic caused a sudden uptick in demand for the high-purity alcohol used in sanitizing products that sent growth into overdrive.

The biggest obstacle to delivering the critical ingredients that customers needed was the company’s commerce site. It didn’t provide the flexibility and configurability needed to leverage Greenfield’s webstore as a customer-focused tool to manage incoming customer service requests and inquiries. Even things like minor cosmetic updates took longer than needed and reacting to customers’ accelerated informational needs and documentational support were not easily accomplished or, in some cases, possible. With an upcoming ERP transition, Greenfield realized that now was the time to make a move to improve its online presence.

“We had significant demand for a product that we were more than willing and able to deliver, but the limitations of our storefront stood between us and our customers,” says Brian Henderson, senior manager of sales operations at Greenfield.

The former commerce site created internal inefficiencies, too. While Greenfield’s sales data was centralized in Salesforce, the commerce tool had a separate, disconnected database that required teams to manually sync the data between the two systems. The company had a long-term plan to evaluate the expansion of ecommerce to the global market, but the disjointed data and limited storefront capabilities made that ambition difficult to execute efficiently.

To meet the needs of customers, the team needed a central hub that could scale commerce, improve agility, and connect data. Greenfield’s current Salesforce ecosystem seemed like a promising solution, but the company needed a dependable collaborator with a strong technical aptitude to fully leverage its power.

After meeting with several prospective partners, it was clear to the Greenfield team that Slalom was the right fit for the project. Our strong technical knowledge, depth of bench from a staffing perspective, and ability to meet tight timelines while building for the future resonated with the company’s leaders. The team trusted that we could help amplify their current commerce capabilities, creating a foundation for expansion while providing ongoing maintenance and support.

After spending time with stakeholders across Greenfield, our technical architects designed a solution that connected Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the organization’s existing Salesforce ecosystem, and the incoming Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP. We created customer stories, articulated technical specifications, and built mock-ups of the new commerce site’s user interface. Each of these steps helped the stakeholders at Greenfield visualize the potential they could unlock with a powerful, connected commerce platform.

The teams’ collective vision came to life in a feature-rich, unified commerce center. The upgrade empowers Greenfield to seamlessly refine its digital storefronts and update the site without coding or development. As a result, Greenfield can communicate changes in its ecommerce ecosystem to customers in near real time. This helps to eliminate delays in the purchasing process, an efficiency that’s essential for buyers beholden to the narrow timelines of manufacturing.

The Slalom team built a master storefront template that Greenfield can quickly replicate for new international markets and brands. Thanks to the pre-built code, each storefront can be tailored to reflect different products and brand elements. Now, Greenfield can pursue its plans for global expansion by launching new storefronts faster than ever, enabling the company to offer its sought-after products to international customers.

Because each individual storefront connects back to Commerce Cloud, orders across the entire organization are unified in a single system. Instead of switching between platforms and juggling disconnected data, Greenfield can leverage a single source of truth with reporting and analytics that reflect a global, 360-degree view of commerce. With improved data visibility, the company has a more detailed understanding of its customers and can better align with their expectations and preferences.

In addition to the templated storefronts, Slalom set the foundation for building a framework of dynamic marketing pages that Greenfield’s internal marketing team will be able to clone and modify directly in Salesforce. Nothing is hard-coded, so new images, logos, and fonts will be just a few clicks away.

With Salesforce at the center of ecommerce, Greenfield has new tools that elevate the B2B site with B2C capabilities. While most B2B storefronts function primarily as a portal for order intake, the company’s new storefront doubles as a catalog so customers can easily find the products and pricing information they’re looking for.

“The new storefronts have B2C elements like SEO-friendly URLs, Google tagging, and Google Analytics. These features make the products more discoverable than ever for potential customers,” says Kim Waselovich, senior director at Slalom. “They even have tools for dynamic pricing, which makes offering volume-based discounts effortless.”

Greenfield now has an entirely revamped commerce ecosystem. With over 1,500 orders placed in the first full year, the transformation has helped Greenfield recapture what would otherwise have been lost revenue and provide ease of ordering to new customers.

With a dynamic platform connecting every facet of eCommerce, Greenfield is in a prime position to launch new storefronts in Canada and Ireland. Once those sites are live and taking orders, they’ll merge into Commerce Cloud where stakeholders can capture all of the international activity in a single system.

But the potential for improvement isn’t limited to global expansion. Currently, Slalom and Greenfield are working to bring a customer’s entire order history—online and otherwise—into the commerce platform. This initiative will give Greenfield a more holistic view of buying patterns while making repeat orders easier for its customers.

“Initiatives that were once impossible or out of reach for Greenfield are suddenly practical,” says Henderson. “Now, we have a set of tools that transform our aspirational goals into attainable outcomes.”