Airbus’ commercial aircraft business: Getting ready to reshape the B2B e-commerce vision for direct sales to take off
Airbus’ commercial aircraft business e-commerce journey
Turning the need to update an aging on-premises commerce solution into the starting point for a B2B e-commerce transformation was important to Airbus’ commercial aircraft business. By adopting the SAP Commerce Cloud portfolio, it is now possible to scale up e-commerce strategy and improve customer satisfaction by better supporting services sales process for Airbus’ commercial aircraft business.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Aerospace and defense | Worldwide headquarters: Toulouse, France | 157,000 employees |
unique customers from 98 countries per year.
service descriptions consulted by customers per year.
of sales converted from ~200 website service inquires per year.
Using e-commerce software obsolescence as an opportunity for change
When its legacy on-premises e-commerce technology was nearing the end of mainstream maintenance, Airbus Commercial seized the opportunity to reevaluate its e-commerce strategy and improve its architecture for standardization and sustainability.
While scrutinizing market offerings that aligned with both immediate and longer-term ambitions, its most pressing needs were mitigating data security risks and supporting business continuity. However, its longer-term vision centered on laying the foundation for a slick B2B e-commerce experience—one that would deliver smooth business transactions for its customers.
Modernizing its e-commerce environment in the cloud
The process of evaluation led Airbus’ commercial aircraft business to understand that replacing its on-premises solution with a cloud-based option would better serve the business with innovation potential while reducing cost, risk, and technical debt. By moving to the cloud, the company could standardize its architecture for cybersecurity best practices and allow design improvements and simplification for sustainability and innovation.
When assessing a number of cloud solutions against its short-term and long-term needs, Airbus’ commercial aircraft business quickly established that the SAP Commerce Cloud portfolio offered the best fit for its complex requirements. This included deep integration with SAP S/4HANA to support its B2B use cases aimed at improving customer satisfaction through a better user experience.
With an ecosystem of on-premises applications covering the end-to-end services sales process, simplified and standardized integration was key for Airbus’ commercial aircraft business. So it was important to select an e-commerce solution capable of integrating into this global ecosystem and supporting stringent data security standards.
In the years to come, the ability to optimize the offer lead time by connecting SAP Commerce Cloud with the SAP CPQ solution using SAP Business Technology Platform is an important consideration for Airbus’ commercial aircraft business. Until then, a third-party analytics tool has been implemented to get a clear view of website usage and customer behavior, which is key to build a customer-oriented strategy.
The ambition of the architecture based on SAP Commerce Cloud is represented in the figure below.
Creating a foundation for a frictionless B2B e-commerce experience
The implementation of SAP Commerce Cloud was the starting point in the creation of a consumer-grade B2B e-commerce experience that’s essential to Airbus’ commercial aircraft business. As part of its global digital customer journey transformation program, the company can see enormous potential for using the solution to deliver more value from B2B e-commerce opportunities.
This starting point includes improved navigation and search functionality using the SAP Commerce Cloud solution as the technology foundation for its web portal, with the SAP Product Content Management solution for catalog and product management. The company also uses SAP Commerce Cloud for creating and managing website content.
Using the solutions in this way helps actively support indirect sales of specific service offerings from its web portal. Since the solution went live in July 2023, the company has recorded 15,000 unique customer connections from 98 countries per year. It has also captured 21,000 services consultations and converted 30% of sales from more than 200 website service inquiries.
In terms of B2B e-commerce potential for direct sales, the sky’s the limit for the company’s ambitions. There’s a huge opportunity to use SAP Commerce Cloud in extending the end-to-end sales process with more services that can be ordered online. In the background, a validated customer order is directly managed through the ordering system and automatically triggers the invoicing stage in SAP S/4HANA.
The experimentation with SAP Commerce Cloud is being used as a pilot for more investment in cloud solutions. This project was very focused on the customer and represented the first major move to cloud solutions at Airbus. SAP CPQ has been implemented in parallel with some services on SAP Business Technology Platform to expand this ecosystem.
Evolving its cloud ecosystem one step at a time
On the near horizon, the plan for Airbus’ commercial aircraft business is to integrate SAP Commerce Cloud with SAP CPQ in the years to come, allowing quotation management and product replication to be synced.
In the future, the plan for the Airbus’ commercial aircraft business is to build an efficient services sales process connecting SAP Commerce Cloud with SAP CPQ to improve the lead time for commercial offers to be sent to customers. SAP CPQ will underpin quoting for training, digital, and subscription services, while SAP Commerce Cloud will support e-commerce transactions connected with SAP S/4HANA for order management and invoicing.
The SAP Commerce Cloud solution proves rewarding to Airbus’ commercial aircraft business, and this cloud experience can be shared with other businesses in the organization.
Over the longer term, the aim for Airbus’ commercial aircraft business is to use SAP Commerce Cloud to implement a personalized experience for customers, improve the search and promotion of services, and increase direct B2B sales from the web portal.