Royal IHC | E-commerce portal, business en loyalty marketing strategie in B2B

Situation

Royal IHC, servicing clients worldwide, was facing a situation where ships delivered at their shipyards were sailing out to the open sea to never see them back again, missing out on spare part sales. Obviously, they wanted to take their share of the billion euro aftermarket.

Achievements

Building a customer loyalty-driven strategy

After winning the pitch I developed Royal IHC’s strategic roadmap, with a central role for an e-commerce spare parts portal, where each individual client would have access to the service operations of the ships in their fleet. Functionality to include i.a. automated ordering based average product wear, drill-down into technical drawings of individual ships’ configurations, order tracking & tracing, digital invoicing. On the other hand, this would give Royal IHC insight into individual client behavior and play a more proactive role in servicing their clients even better.

Deploying a worldwide e-commerce spare parts portal

The strategy included a 5-year roadmap, laid down in a project/program initiation document. The plan described the overall program stages and, per stage, the overall functionality to deliver. We also pictured the position of the customer-service spare parts portal in their ICT architecture and how the source systems would need to feed product and other data into the portal and vice versa. We started to design, develop and implement the stage 1 version of the spare parts customer service portal, where we added functionality over time with new projects in the program.

Taking the orchestrator role in their supply chain

In order to accelerate growth in spare part sales, I advised them to consider the orchestrator role in their supply chain. This would position them to take a much larger share of the EUR 8.5 billion market as opposed to their current role. Something the board decided as the new focus after internal deliberations and discussions.

Supply chain orchestrator strategic implementation roadmap

Following the Board’s decision, I developed a supply chain orchestrator implementation roadmap around 5 domains: Customers, Marketing & Sales, Supply Chain Management, Procurement & Legal and ICT & Data. Also highlighting the relationship between the domains and dependencies. Consequently, I translated it into a concrete action plan as the basis for implementation and roll-out.

Results

  • Custom-built e-commerce spare part portal enabling clients to autonomously optimize the ‘uptime’ of the ships in their fleet.
  • Future-proof ICT architecture, emphasizing points of interest and focus areas to make the e-commerce portal run smoothly.
  • The spare part e-commerce operations were benchmarked by former McKinsey consultants with the conclusion that Royal IHC performed on par.
  • Strategic direction including implementation roadmap as the basis for shaping individual project plans in the overall program.

Competencies

  • Digital disruption
  • Digital transformation
  • E-commerce
  • Strategic consulting
  • Marketing strategy
  • Customer experience management
  • Supply chain management
  • Logistics
  • Service design

Operating territory

Worldwide

Period

2010 – 2014