ResMed breathes easier after launching its B2B business online with BigCommerce

The ResMed success story

ResMed is a world-leading connected health company with more than 9 million cloud-connected devices for daily remote patient monitoring that changes lives with every breath.

Its 7,500 member team and award-winning devices and software solutions help treat and manage sleep apnea, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and other respiratory conditions that ultimately improve patients’ quality of life and save healthcare costs in more than 120 countries.

Challenges with previous business processes

As told to BigCommerce by Rajiv Shanmungananthan, Customer Facing Applications Lead at ResMed Asia, resmed.com

Previously, all B2B orders were placed through emails or phone calls and logged in spreadsheets. We experienced very little visibility into the order process and our sales operations team in the region faced the following challenges:

• Difficulty keeping track of order fulfillment status
• Significant communication issues between the logistics team, sales team, and management team approving and processing orders
• Errors due to the manual entry of order details that resulted in significant time and resources spent to fix and troubleshoot issues
• Peak periods at the end of the month which resulted in long delays for stock to reach our distributors
• The finance team were kept busy calculating and updating credit limits as well as confusion with pending payments
• Lack of data prohibited analyzing performance and unable to improve processes

Overall, at the end of the month, we experienced complete chaos that consumed most of the team’s time and attributed to approximately 54 work hours per week, which meant they could not concentrate on other revenue-generating activities.

Assessing ecommerce solutions to solve pain points

As told to BigCommerce by Rajiv Shanmungananthan, Customer Facing Applications Lead at ResMed Asia, resmed.com

After experiencing success with our other direct to consumer websites powered by BigCommerce, we were hoping the solution could accommodate the launch of our India-based B2B business on its platform as well.

We were focused on finding an ecommerce solution with the following:

• Rich features and functionality with B2B capabilities
• Quick time to market with more turn key features and less development
• An agile platform: easy to set up, easy to use, easy to integrate, and easy to change
• Lower total cost of ownership and cost scalability with growth
• Ability to support multiple languages, currencies, and tax systems in Asia
• Multiple payment gateways

The ultimate B2B feature differentiators that were the deciding factors included BigCommerce’s ability to setup login-only access for distributors, create customer groups and custom price lists, create promotions with coupons and cart-level discounts, easy inventory management, and ability to provide a store credit to customers.

Flexibility and functionality for a modern B2B shopping experience on BigCommerce

As told to BigCommerce by Rajiv Shanmungananthan, Customer Facing Applications Lead at ResMed Asia, resmed.com

We were looking forward to creating a streamlined purchasing process for our modern B2B buyer and mitigating the issues our team was having with the current order process.

The store implementation to launch our B2B business was accomplished within three months due to the turn-key nature of the BigCommerce platform. The project was relatively quick because of the easy configuration with BigCommerce’s out-of-the-box features, simple integration with our ERP, Sage 300, for orders and credit limits, and easy data migration of our product catalog and distributor accounts. The configuration ability of BigCommerce enabled us to set up very complex tax rules in India for our products.

We also found BigCommerce’s online, knowledge base resources comprised of videos, feature documentation, support articles and blogs to be very useful during our implementation.  

Our distributors are a diverse group with some more tech-savvy than others. Prior to moving our business online, we feared the risk of their acceptance and adoption of the new online store to place orders.

We prepared how-to videos and our business team ran training sessions for our distributors in order to help them onboard. While most of the distributors were able to shop our new online store with relative ease, there was still a reasonable portion who faced difficulty.

In quick response, our team was proactive in modifying the BigCommerce storefront with helpful tips within form fields, labels, and instructions to make it easier for the less tech-savvy customers while also being able to localize languages for increased understanding.

It only took us six weeks to get all our 100 distributors onboard and using the new site.

Delivering solutions for previous challenges and strong benefits

As told to BigCommerce by Rajiv Shanmungananthan, Customer Facing Applications Lead at ResMed Asia, resmed.com

The launch of our B2B online store brought relief to our team, eradicating chaos from the end of the month, and providing support to their order management activities.

The challenges faced by our team were largely overcome with BigCommerce and we also experienced additional benefits such as:

• The power to be creative with the platform's extensive promotions capabilities to influence distributor ordering patterns and behaviors. For example, we ran online promotions to reward distributors who were willing to order earlier in the month, rather than waiting until the end of the month which previously added a heavier workload to our logistics team
• The product management control panel shows us a real-time view of inventory which enables us to respond quickly and adjusting our supply ordering patterns
• We found an opportunity to improve orders for accessories, giving greater visibility to our distributors in need of related products
• The analytics dashboard provides valuable data and insights that were truly invaluable in our strategy and planning like the abandoned cart feature and analytics dashboard.

A platform that does it all

As told to BigCommerce by Rajiv Shanmungananthan, Customer Facing Applications Lead at ResMed Asia, resmed.com

Overall, BigCommerce has greatly helped our team in India stay focused on the growth of our new online B2B ecommerce business by giving them more time to focus on marketing and other more strategic initiatives because they are less immersed in operational order processing activities.

We’re looking forward to leveraging BigCommerce for many of our Asia markets in local languages and utilizing more features and integrations in the near future.