The Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und ?prüfung - BAM) is responsible for the development of safety and reliability in chemical and materials technologies. The BAM distributes reference material to approx. 600 national and international scientific and industrial customers. These reference material is used for callibrating instruments, judging measuring methods, or for identifying material characteristics and specific values. Each year, some 1000 orders are processed, with an order value of each order between 100 and 5000 Euro. The distribution of reference materials generates an annual turnover of more than half a million Euro. Within the BAM, four different departments distribute the reference materials. On an average two to three employees are involved in the order and shipping process. The project for setting up the web-shop aims at the following goals: - Increase customers' satisfaction by introducing an easier way of ordering - Announce new products faster - Optimise processes in the involved departments by shortening and harmonising the procedures - Avoid redundant data and manual data input into different systems - Standard shipping costs (fixed prices, lump sum) - The customer and sales data is entered and administered within one database - The current catalogue can be printed from the webshop

Main results, benefits and impacts

With the current way of working, the costs for selling reference materials amount to 124,000 Euro yearly. Introducing the webshop together with an optimised process could save 87,000 Euro each year. The total investment costs will thus already pay off in the second year.

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Lessons learnt

Key success factors - Firm time management - A service which is especially suitable for an online service - Cooperation with the basic component "payment transactions platform", the supervisor / external consultant in charge and the responsible competence center - Involving all staff which is dealing with the sales and distribution of reference material through workshops during the analysis and modeling of the process. - Acceptance of the procedure by all persons involved in the process. - Integration of the existing special procedure (ERP system PARFIS/Hasy) - Interplay of all technical component (web shop, payment transaction platform, ERP system)