Ben Lorenz, managing partner of Human Element, and Graydon Bazell, senior account executive at Sana Commerce, talk about the new partnership between the two companies. This collaboration broadens Human Element’s B2B technology offerings, allowing clients an additional option when it comes to choosing a platform that works best for them. Because Sana Commerce is engineered specifically for B2B, its ready-to-use platform allows those types of businesses to realize value quickly. The platform easily creates and manages complex product catalogs because all web store data is synchronized with inventory. It integrates with: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems Microsoft Dynamics and SAP
- Product Information Management (PIM) systems
- Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) software
- Payment service providers
- Shipping providers
- Email marketing solutions
and more… “Human Element is an excellent addition to our roster of technology partners. They’ve proven themselves in our industry as experts in B2B commerce,” said VP, Global Partnerships at Sana Commerce, Jeff Siegel. “Their expertise with ERP integrations and custom development make them a perfect complement to the Sana platform, providing B2B businesses with tailor-made commerce solutions that increase efficiency and drive sales.” Human Element works with manufacturers and distributors at all stages of digital maturity. Whether the client wants to build out their first eCommerce operation or migrate from a different platform, Human Element has been on those journeys with dozens of B2B businesses over the years. The agency offers strategic consulting, platform selection, and roadmapping services to help with making technical decisions and to break up the process of building eCommerce operations into manageable steps. “Over our 20 years of experience in eCommerce, we’ve seen it all when it comes to platform integrations. B2B integrations can be more complex than B2C, and it’s important to choose the right platform. Sana Commerce can handle things like complex product assortment, personalization, web store adoption rates, and more,” said Managing Director of Human Element, Ben Lorenz. “We’re excited that Sana improves on the speed of implementation over other platforms when using Microsoft Dynamics and SAP.” To learn more about how Human Element can help with a Sana Commerce integration, please get in touch at the Human Element website.
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Full Episode Transcript
Ben Lorenz: My name is Ben Lorenz from Human Element. We’re going to have a conversation with Graydon from Sauna Commerce today about the e-commerce platform that they have built and Human Element is now a new partner of. We’re excited to announce our partnership with Sauna and are excited to be taking on projects and working with this team on this really elegant B2B platform. I’m going to turn it over to you, Graydon. Maybe you can introduce yourself.
Graydon Bazell: Great. Thanks, Ben. Really excited to be here and very excited that Human Element is joining the SANA family and starting this partnership with us. Excited to see what Human Element’s bringing to the table, elevating the game and B2B e-commerce with us. I’m Graydon Basil. I’m a senior account executive at SANA. But I actually started in e-commerce a long time ago. I came from the merchant side. I was at Division of S.L.R. Exotica where I ran three different B2B e-commerce shops. So I’m new to the world of the platform side and really familiar with probably where a lot of your clients are. On the side of how do we make the customer experience better for our e-commerce buyers, our B2B buyers? How do we increase efficiency on both sides of this B2B transaction? Yeah, looking forward to talking to you today. And like I said, just really excited to see how Human Element can take this on a platform and leverage it for your clients.
Ben Lorenz: Great. I started my e-commerce journey in, was it 98 or 99, I think, at a company called Fry. And it was before we had platforms. And so we worked on one of the first e-commerce platforms ever. And we built sites like 1-800-Flowers and Crate and Barrel and Eddie Bauer and things like that. And so I’ve been in this field for a very long time and I’ve seen the advent of platforms come into the scene. And then I’ve seen the advent of those platforms now becoming sort of like cloud products. and the benefits and pros and cons of those things. And so Human Element is an organization that started off as just purely consulting. And then as platforms became more of a thing, we’ve been in business over 20 years. And so as platforms started to become a thing, we started to take on platforms to make our customers’ lives easier. And so you would think that building an e-commerce system from scratch is a very, very difficult thing to do. And it is. But when platforms came out, it was like, oh, gosh, we could do this a lot easier. And then you run into other compounding problems. Right. And it gets bigger and the ecosphere gets bigger. And so we’ve grown as an organization as being really client focused and client first. Many of our clients have been with us for 15, almost 20 years. We’ve been through several replatforms with them. And I like to say we’re a bit agnostic when it comes to platform selection. But we’re really focused on selecting a platform and integrating things that work really well and have a good ROI for our clients.
Graydon Bazell: Agnostic isn’t indifferent, right? Yeah. You’re making a very guided, trusted advisor, making a very informed choice for it. Yes.
Ben Lorenz: And that’s worked well for us and has shown that these customers will stay with us for a very long time based on that good advice. And so when we were reviewing platforms that we would like to take on this past year, we saw Asana in this sort of targeted market of working with ERP platforms like SAP and Microsoft Dynamics specifically and having a really sort of fresh approach to integration. And that’s always one of the biggest areas where when we’re consulting that a lot of cash is spent and not a lot of ROI because you’re building something new every time. Maybe you could talk a little bit about why SANA really accelerates development.
Graydon Bazell: Absolutely. And so we start with an ERP integration approach first. And that’s a really different philosophy from, I think, most of the e-commerce platforms that your clients and most of the market’s familiar with. And it lends itself to B2B e-commerce specifically because these businesses are running their business every day in their ERPs. And when it comes to managing the core of their business, pricing, inventory, the specifics, the intricacies and complexities of the business, all of that logic is housed in their ERP already. Right. And when you go to stand up on a new e-commerce platform, you have two choices. You can start with a platform that’s integrated, that can take that logic, that complexity that’s already been built and the investment’s been made and developing in the ERP. and reflect it using an integrated connector or choose to rebuild it, re-architect it and try and recreate it using the e-commerce platform. And typically the costs of doing that are much higher, the maintenance is much higher. And then there’s always introduces an element of risk that there will be some discrepancy between what your customer sees online and what your back office team sees and what you want them to see in the ERP. With an integrated solution, when you take that ERP integration philosophy as first principle, you eliminate that risk. You always ensure that your customer and your back office team are seeing the same thing. And there’s no discrepancy between that price, that inventory, that transaction is always going to be mirror image on both sides.
Ben Lorenz: We have historically been an Adobe commerce shop. And so our need to sort of bring more ROI to our customers new feature development that is highly focused in the B2B market and speed to market. And just being able to release some of these features or have a company that is actively sort of upgrading and improving on the platform, you know, in a way that brings value for that subscription fee that they’re paying. Right. And so maybe talk a little bit about, how Sauna is approaching that speed to market and feature development?
Graydon Bazell: Absolutely. The big focus for Sauna right now is improving time to value. It’s one of the core pillars of our development today. We’re moving towards bringing customers online in 90 days. That’s a key goal for us right now. Can we deliver time to value in 90 days? A major objective for us. It’s possible when you start with configuration as the core principle of your platform, config first. So that means when we start a project, we can spin up a development environment in just the first couple of weeks, we install our connector in the ERP. And from just a few days of smoke testing, you’re already seeing your products, your pricing, your inventory, all of that completely connected and available on the web. And you’re developing your site. And it’s remarkable, it’s this aha moment, this light bulb moment when you’re just a few weeks into your project and you have an e-commerce site that’s already functioning and working. And not simply like a Shopify site where I’ve got products and a base price, but no, customer specific pricing, customer specific agreements, customer specific assortments and inventory all functioning, right? That’s the kind of accelerator, something you would, think on Adobe Commerce have to spend weeks or months in custom development to try and execute lots of billable hours, lots of testing and iteration to get right on a unique connector. We’re doing out of the box.
Ben Lorenz: Yeah, I think one of the other things that really sold me on the value proposition of sauna is we work with a lot of tier one tier two maybe tier three suppliers manufacturing and they are purchasing other companies at a breakneck pace and so sauna has the ability as i understand it to work with other bespoke erp systems right so you might have two or three instances of an ERP system, say SAP installs. Talk to me a little bit about how Sana leverages
Graydon Bazell: Yeah, it’s called multi-installation or multi-framework support. So, Sana supports SAP S/4HANA, SAP ECC, and all flavors of Microsoft Dynamics that are out there. D365, F&O, and Business Central. And yes, that’s a, you know, the pace of that many slowed a little bit in recent years, but we think that’s picking back up. And we’ll see that, yes, you can connect one instance of SANA to multiple instances of SAP or multiple different sales areas or instances of Business Central. And then from there, you know, for regionalization support, if you say you want to enter a new region, really easy to spin up a new storefront and you use that same data to, I need to launch a new storefront for Latin America with different currency or just a different skin, a different storefront, but use the same core data, use the same backend logic, same ERP and the same admin center. Very easy to start adding on additional stores connected to the same ERP or set of ERPs. Yeah. Very flexible framework, enabling to do that.
Ben Lorenz: When I think about the usual e-commerce suspects, right? Like, you know, BigCommerce, Shopify Plus, Adobe Commerce, there’s Oro that is out there. These are all systems that require a fair amount of development. And we develop on them and have historically. And you mentioned earlier sort of the length of development time, right? And what I have found as a consultant in this industry for so long is that if you ask a question of a customer and you ask them how they want to do it, they will tell you a very complex process that they have been doing on paper forever, right? And the script under your situation is when we come in and we demo and we’re able to create a proof of concept of this platform that’s up and running on their ERP immediately, we can say, if you change these processes just a little bit and let the platform do the work, we’ve now saved you a six month timeline to build some crazy integration feature that if you decide to integrate another ERP system or purchase another company or a new region, you will also have to have some technical debt moving forward. And so you’re sort of removing, in a sense, a ton of technical debt for our customers just by the nature of saying, we don’t need to build features from ground up. You don’t need to invent or be a software development organization, you know, Mr. Manufacturer. We have this worked out for you already.
Graydon Bazell: No, and where you do need, and where you do see an area that you say, well, the platform doesn’t meet this particular need, we’ve built extension points. We’ve added areas where without breaking SaaS, without breaking the core of what we see as a value proposition, you can add features, you can add functionality and continue to enjoy all the benefits of continuous delivery and updates, bi-weekly updates and bug fixes and patches and new feature releases, but do so in a way that gives you flexibility and functionality, leveraging your experience and your consultation, but doing so in a really kind of tailored way that keeps you from going too deep into reinventing the wheel, right? We have the core B2B use cases solved. We have the core B2B use cases taken care of for you if you need a couple of changes here and there, we have the ability to add those functionalities for you. And we do that in a way that protects you from needing to re-platform every two years when an update comes around. It’s not a major, when an update is needed, it’s not a major re-platforming starting from scratch in a two month, three month project with a team of programmers to do so.
Ben Lorenz: So pretty quick time to implementation. I mean, 90-day target is pretty incredible for the types of features that you’re rolling out. Very highly functional and literate sort of B2B suite of features, ability to expand into multi-regions and multi-erp systems. And then, you know, a roadmap that is taking users into the future. So we’ve covered off on those things. Can you talk a little bit about how you communicate out to your customers and the people that are using SANA, what features are being released and what the community is like around the platform? I think that’s one of those things that, you know, is sometimes a little bit of a black box for other agencies. they don’t know what’s coming um and boom you get a release or there’s a security update and you’re you know the tail’s wagging the dog yeah talk a little bit about that absolutely
Graydon Bazell: So we have um we have a quarterly milestones and we call them sauna spotlights and we like to send them around uh events so we just had our b2b commerce connect which was a a full day customer and partner event set of webinars in person and virtual event out of Rotterdam and we wrapped up the day with us on a spotlight was a 30 minute event where we talked about all of our upcoming features and it was a big launch moment where we also launched five major milestone new features for us included a big update to our b2b subscriptions module it also included a new multi-warehouse inventory feature and a few others. I’m going to forget it. We take those moments as well to share thought leadership with our customers, to bring in some of the leading voices of B2B eCommerce, to bring forward customer stories, to bring forward partner stories. It’s a community. When you join SANA, you’re not going to come onto the platform and start using and send you off into here are the keys, go ahead. Now you’re part of the community, you’re part of the family. And we like to bring forward these voices because there’s, you know, when you’re successful, we’re successful. Our success is determined, defined by the success of our customers. So we had, we just had that in November, November 14th. The next one’s coming up in February. We’ll have continual quarterly launches of our new products. In addition to, like I said, every two weeks, we’ve got, you know, regular small features and bug fixes that are coming out. But that’s how we launched it. You can see published on our site, open for everyone to see. We have a roadmap published and we solicit feature requests from our customers and our partners. And they can vote on features they’d like to have included in our roadmap. And they can see what’s coming up next week, next quarter, next year. And what we’re working on is out there for the public to see.
Ben Lorenz: Yeah, that’s great. one of the other opportunities that we saw as an SI. So we are not an ERP implementer at all. Human Element historically implements e-commerce platforms, and then we help manage and maintain and grow them over time. About 70% of our ongoing revenue is in ongoing improvements and basically setting the stage and roadmap for our customers to succeed with their e-commerce platforms. B2B e-commerce can be a very specific thing. And it’s not always the case that an ERP implementer is focused on the e-commerce component.
Graydon Bazell: Right. Rarely, I would say.
Ben Lorenz: Yes. And so human element is, you know, when we were introduced to Sanaa, we asked this very question, we were like, who’s focused on the e-commerce growth path for your customers? Who’s going to be, really dialed in to tweaking that, tracking it, pushing it forward, making sure that, you know, new feature requests get put in that are, you know, being required for future commerce type activities, that type of thing. And so maybe talk a little bit about, you know, that opportunity for Human Element in your world. You know, we’re really excited about integrating with some ERP folks to do this and to take on the charge of growing that B2B channel for the SANA customers.
Graydon Bazell: I think HumanEllen has a huge role to play here. I think all of our, you know, the e-commerce SIs and integrators, especially HumanEllen, have a massive role to play in defining the future of SANA Commerce because you can be the voice of our customer. And not only are you shaping their needs and helping understand their roadmap, but you’re also the expert user of our product. you know as you as you get to know sauna get to know uh through our implementation for our projects and through the everyday use can be the the the voice of um you know the power user uh for us to say here here’s what we’re where to go next what what uh so what’s what’s on the roadmap what what what’s on the uh what’s on the competitive landscape as well right uh i yeah sorry the questions kind of lost me there for a second i absolutely think that there’s a a great it’s a two-way partnership right you’ve your experience your um your it sounds like decades of experience in in this field is going to be a massive resource for us to help us serve our customers uh better yeah
Ben Lorenz: Awesome yeah well we are looking forward to participating um actively with you move as you guys roll out features and as we start to support your client base um i assume we’re going to attend a few uh conferences together here in the near future i know we’re planning that uh right now is there anything else we should mention before we sign off uh uh about you know maybe the partnership or or sauna itself our our audience might find interesting i’ve got a lawnmower going outside my window all of a sudden.
Graydon Bazell: Every time man.
Ben Lorenz: Every single time glad we got that uh just at the right moment we were so close Graydon, thank you so much for taking some time out today and talking about Sonic Commerce with Human Element. We’re very excited about what’s in store for our two companies and our partnership. And we look forward to making it out to some trade shows with you and doing some sort of joint announcements together.
Graydon Bazell: And I cannot wait. It’s been a real pleasure. Looking forward to kicking this partnership off and uh can’t wait to i’ll see you on the road sure we’ll be out there soon
Ben Lorenz: Yep, all right take care my friend bye.