Joining forces to streamline e-commerce for Manufacturing and Distribution companies

Tomas Landquist, CEO Part Trap AB, Robert Majanen, COO Roima Intelligence Inc., and CEO Roima Sverige AB.

In the consumer market, companies have long recognized the benefits of e-commerce. Today, it is a rule rather than an exception that you mainly reach customers through digital platforms. However, the B2B market has been lagging several years behind in development, something that is rapidly starting to change.

What we often encountered before the pandemic was the attitude “e-commerce is not for us, it doesn’t work in our industry”. This has started to change now that companies realize that they must start digitalizing and that the train is leaving the station now,” says Tomas Landquist, CEO of the software company Part Trap. 

A large part of the explanation relates to the fact that industries are digitized at an increasingly rapid pace. This means that the right type of data is now available to conduct e-commerce simply and flexibly. In addition, companies have realized that the concept of e-commerce is about so much more than placing orders — you can streamline the entire sales process by making information available and reaching out to a larger customer base. 

Today when an ERP supplier or partner sells an ERP system to a customer, it’s becoming a requirement to also offer an eCommerce solution as a part of that package,” Tomas Landquist states. 

In December, Roima Intelligence — a fast-growing software company with solutions for industrial manufacturing and logistics — announced the acquisition of Part Trap. The acquisition is a natural step seeing that both companies are working towards discrete manufacturing, have similar customer bases, and offer services that seamlessly complement each other. They hope to revolutionize e-commerce for manufacturing and distributing companies with their combined offer. 

“Before the merger with Part Trap, Roima focused a lot on manufacturing and supply chain. Thanks to our combined offer, manufacturers can now also take full control over not only the supply chain but the entire value chain and meet their customers in a much better way than they could before,” says Robert Majanen, COO at Roima Intelligence. 

Part Trap’s flagship product, Parttrap ONE, gives B2B companies access to a complete e-commerce platform that simplifies digital sales processes for manufacturing companies and distributors. The platform is integrated to a range of leading ERP systems and utilizes the data that already exists there. The system also allows sharing of information relating to product descriptions, technical specifications, images, documents, and product accessories. 

With Roima’s access to information on inventory management, production status, and blueprints — to name a few examples — the two companies see big gains in joining forces. 

“We create digital customer portals rather than “just a web shop”. We make the companies’ internal information about customers and products available online and are a digital seller or a customer service that is available 24/7 – customers have access to all the real-time information they need to do business with the company without having to contact their customer service,” says Tomas Landquist. 

This means that you can reduce the load on your manual service desk in the handling of, for example, sales of new products or spare parts. The core of the Parttrap ONE and what makes it unique is the standard integration to the ERP system.

“The key to successful digital sales processes lies in the integration with the ERP system. This allows us to get information about customers, terms, products customer-unique prices, balances, orders, and invoices and become efficient in the process. Our competitors often start from the other end – First, you build a web shop or a website and then you integrate, which usually means a costly and lengthy process,” says Tomas Landquist. 

Since its founding, Roima has experienced steady growth, largely thanks to acquisitions that have given the company access to new markets in the Nordics. Today, Roima has over 400 customers globally and a turnover of nearly 45 million euros, including Part Trap. With the acquisition of Part Trap, the aim is to expand into new markets, including the North American one. 

We intend to continue this growth journey and have identified Part Trap as a fantastic candidate to start working together with for that purpose. We see tremendous synergies both on the customer side and on the product side. Part Trap has built up a significant customer base in North America, and together we see great opportunities there for our combined offering,” says Robert Majanen. 

As a subsidiary of Roima, Tomas Landquist also sees opportunities for Part Trap to grow in the Nordics.

Part Trap is very strong in North America, around 36 percent of our sales are there, and our new customer sales are primarily in the USA. We believe that we can help Roima enter that market. On the other hand, Roima is stronger when it comes to the Nordics, so we see opportunities to get traction from Roima to strengthen our position there,” concludes Tomas Landquist.