Digitize Before You Automate: Yoav Kutner, Founder & CEO of OroCommerce, on the B2B Commerce Gap (Recorded at the B2B eCommerce Association)

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Well, we're here with Joab Kuttner, founder of Oro Commerce. Joab, you're being very brave. You're talking to me off the cuff. Put on the record.

How's your show been so far? So far, so good. We'll see uh existing customers and prospects that we're already talking to. Otherwise, great uh kind of coming together of the e-commerce B2B mines to solve problems together.

So good. I was blown away by how how quickly it was oversold. You know, it's their very first year, and clearly people are looking to learn a heck of a lot more about B2B commerce than they knew. So when uh what has been your your uh input from the customers that you've seen here?

What have they been looking to do? I think what they mainly want to still do, which is uh kind of funny for a lot of technologists, is learning that the B2B kind of uh space is about five to ten years behind technology where we are all thinking we should bring them to. So still uh a lot of uh automation, a lot of digitization of uh business processes and actually getting them to digital. So kind of a lot of them are still in the baby steps versus what we think they all should do, which is AI and composable and everything else.

We're talking about a lot of baby steps and really getting them into the digital realm of uh running their business online. Well, I I certainly can't, you know, I'm not gonna uh name names. Well, I am, you know, I certainly know uh SAP has always said, well, all the B2B commerce is gonna take place within the platform. That's baloney.

That's baloney. So what has been your experience kind of reprogramming those folks from that messenger? So absolutely, I think the best way to kind of refer to what we do for our customers is creating the layer on top of the ERP. So actually exposing the ERP to both our customers, our sales teams, marketers, etc.

So we're really a lot of time not even referenced as the e-commerce layer. We're referenced as the layer above the ERP that exposes everything, allows customers to actually act under data, uh, review their data, change what they need to do with their orders and stuff like that, allowing salespeople to actually do work without breaking uh the ERP uh workflows that they somebody created 20 years ago. So actually allowing them to operate with a digital platform and having their customers get a much better user experience than that.

Well, the sales agent, the the the I've heard from a couple of uh chief digital officers at this show that uh they're experiencing pushback from sales executives not wanting to adopt the modern B2B commerce solutions. What would you say to them? What's in it for? Well, I think again, like I said, it's about the user experience so they can now deliver both through their customers and their sales team.

Um and it's something that a lot of these companies are lagging behind other companies in other spaces, definitely allowing your customers to self-interact with the company, get self-serve kind of uh features that they need in order to be productive in communicating with the company they're buying from. So if it's uh checking in an order status or putting another order in or checking an inventory in case they want to build a PO, like a large PO for a big project, getting pricing for different projects in one uh platform without having to pick up a phone or send an email to a sales rep to get those uh figures out.

I think this is like small steps that we kind of add all together. But like I said, for me it's definitely the user experience that now you can deliver to your buyers as a B2B seller, and the feedback that they'll get that you'll get from them is that they'll continue being your customer. If you are right now, if you're not considering like any digital platform for your customers, you are in a risk of losing them in the next future. Customers, uh B2B customer engagement online has skyrocketed.

I mean, it's uh I I believe it's tripled in terms just in the last two years. Two to three years, yeah. Yeah, which is I I'm shocked that so many companies haven't adopted a modern stack. Now, when you talk about exposing the data in ERP, you know, one of the big problems that customers are experiencing with digital transformation and modern commerce is that silo data.

How do you overcome that? So we're a very flexible solution in terms of the data uh kind of architecture that we have. Um, so we can actually um get any structure of the data that they have in the European. We're talking about like very archaic systems sometimes, the S400s, systems, etc.

Uh, sometimes it's uh serialized data, and we're able to put it in a fashion that is actually accessible, both for reporting, both for accessing by the customers and by the sellers, etc. Uh, and by delivering this kind of layer on top of what they don't want to touch each other, which is the ARP, we actually do work with the data that we get. Plus, we bring a lot of new data, a lot of new data into the system. So we can actually send it back to the ERP uh for any kind of uh business intelligence software or AI systems that have to operate on the ERP level that can get a lot more data from us than we wouldn't have to try to have.

So in this day and age where so many chief digital offices and chief technical offices are getting pressure from their board to adopt modern AI solutions when they haven't even modernized their commerce stack, what advantages do they have to first adopting a modern commerce layer like Oro to prepare them for that AI transformation? Great question. So I think by by uh having a platform like Oral Commerce involved, we can move very fast compared to like an ERP and especially old software and stuff like that.

So we can really kind of test the waters, see what works before you have to go in from it all the way down. Uh, and that's something we uh we do with our customers all the time. So we we kind of go and look what's their biggest uh pain points right now with their customer experience. We kind of um try to kind of solve for that and learn and then get feedback from customers on an ongoing basis and be able being able to kind of change and uh adapt to what the actual customers are asking for.

Um, you know, if you know anything about the old systems, that will take you years. We do it in weeks in best. We we have a lot of customers that have revolving uh kind of uh release uh schedules for weeks to release new features, uh features for their customers. They're also able to kind of uh target specific customers from data users, get feedback from them before they uh release it to everybody else.

So again, using modern software allows you to kind of test the waters a lot faster, get feedback, and adjust based on what they learn from your customers in real time. Well, uh, you know, it it's been an interesting year uh in in software sales in general. Uh it's been a little bit slower, and I think that's because of the I think that you know the the the it's just been uh because of the rush to uh and the the hype around AI. I think solutions that are proven, like Oro, obviously, uh you know, have kind of lost their luster in some of the customers' eyes.

And I think it's important to remember that there's more challenges with adopting AI, especially building your own generator of AI, than adopting a modern commerce stack that's going to solve problems that you know you have today that are gonna re uh result in higher uh revenues and higher conversion rates. But from your perspective, if you're looking at whoever that's here that's gonna be driving that change, uh whether it be adopting a new commerce platform, adopting uh a new AI platform, whatever it be, what do you think is the biggest impediment that businesses and distributors are having right now in adopting technology?

So I think again, first of all, it's uh kind of understanding how you digitize what we actually have to do. So the work that has to be done. If you're just jumping into AI, if you train the AI model and stuff that you don't know how to how it should work is the problem. So, what we're seeing with the adoption of our customers, for example, we spend a few months with them digitizing their main processes, business processes, both front end and back end.

By that we're allowing the AI uh agents that we have built into Our Commerce to actually replace those manual processes that we built for them with an AI implementation, and that allows them to get to market with something that they know that works the way they want it to. Imagine testing that with an AI agent without understanding what you want the AI agent to do. So, by actually establishing a digital process before running and automating it with AI, that's the biggest lesson I can share with everybody because our customers many times don't know how and what they even want to digitize before they go digital.

So, a lot of what we do is actually explain to them how a digital platform can serve them. So them rethinking their existing processes and do I need to get a fax and pass it to Tim from accounting first or not? So just understanding how we can optimize our processes using digital, AI comes naturally. There's no transition.

We we have right now our uh smart smart order and smart agent uh that work uh seamlessly into our application, but they work for our customers because we already know the processes that we should train them on before they start guessing. That makes sense. It does. Does Aura have an integrated OMS?

An OMS we have an OMS, but again, I won't say that we that's what we specialize in. Uh, usually we come to a much more mature companies where we already have an ERP implementation, they have an OMS management, uh sort of order management system there already, warehouse management. But we actually do a lot of the have lifting. For example, for a lot of our customers that have multiple warehouses, uh, Aura is the one that decides where that decides where to funnel the order to, what the warehouse gets the orders and stuff like that.

So we act a lot more than just the e-commerce platform. We actually act like on the top of everything that's going on in the company. We have we have uh a customer that has uh over six uh ERPs integrated into order because of the positions, etc. So Aura is basically um acting as the order management system, right?

And decides where to fund every order and actually every line item. So Aura knows where the best pricing is and why the ERP, even though there might be different data across the board. Then from all the acquisitions, they have about 40 warehouses. Aura also knows where to send the actual orders so they get from the best or warehouse, and all that logic is built on our labor.

So instead of going and you know, implementing in ERP for all the six different companies that are acquired, there's one basically order management system, which is over sitting on top and funneling the orders and uh warehouse uh orders into the right place uh automatically. Fabulous. Well, we've got a lot of partners here as well for digital transformation. I hope that you have a wonderful show.

I hope that uh this year continues to be a record year for you and you set new records next year. Absolutely. Thanks so much for that. Thanks for listening to Mark Doc, the number one podcast for e-commerce and marketing applications.

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