Overview

Satair is one of the world's leading suppliers of aircraft parts and services. The company saw the need for radical digital transformation and embarked on an ambitious project to stay ahead of the competition.

That’s where Merkle stepped in — to help guide the transformation and help Satair reach new heights.

Services
Experience & Commerce

Market
Denmark

Tech Partners
Mirakl

The challenge

As the airline industry returned to profitability, Satair’s commerce platform began to gain momentum fast. Satair sought a total overhaul of their digital service business while further driving growth, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.

With the overhaul came other opportunity areas. For one, ordering airline parts is complex, based on old, error-prone systems. Second, airlines demand end-to-end visibility into parts and products as they move from order to tarmac. Then there is the pressure for more competitive pricing, new selling models, and the ability to anticipate needs such as maintenance.

The approach

Merkle’s plan was to create a one-of-a-kind, end-to-end AI-guided commerce and service experience.

Future-Ready Architecture

To meet the needs of today and tomorrow, we designed a scalable architecture that follows strategic principles to ensure easy maintenance, flexibility, as well as extensibility to ensure quick and painless integrations in to other applications and services from Satair and Airbus.

The foundation was built as a headless commerce setup, with all business logic in the Commerce Cloud and a modern front-end framework. This was to ensure a seamless user experience and more freedom for the business to roll out digital products and service concepts.

At the heart of the architecture is a CDP built on a Hadoop database in the Google Cloud, which pulls data from not only Satair's core systems (such as ERP, CRM and SPEC 2000), but also behavioral data from the Adobe stack consisting of Target, Analytics and Campaign to advanced segmentation and personalization.

The solution was further optimized with an API-first orchestration layer, which makes it even easier for Satair to connect new platforms and applications to this commerce platform.

CX North Star

Merkle developed Satair’s digital north star, a program that fully digitized their sales and service flows, saving Satair and their clients time and money. At the heart of this was a clearly articulated, multi-year strategy to guide design and development roadmaps across the digital business.

The complex purchase journey for airplane parts is served by a custom interface for purchasing parts, designed with input from real users. The experience includes a powerful functionality to support complex search, basket building, and ordering flows. Additional features such as interchangeable part listings and bulk SKU search helped simplify workflows.

Logistics Matter

Airplane parts are often ordered at time of need, so speed and transparency into order routing is critical to customer satisfaction. Merkle designed a new commerce ecosystem with real-time data. The end-to-end system connected key data across the journey from moment of need to part delivery. Customers can track real-time order status and location, ensuring planes could be flight-ready at a faster and more reliable rate.

Third-party marketplace

Core commerce is supported by a Mirakl-powered third-party marketplace. Satair was aware that many parts sales were happening outside of their business – both in the form of peer-to-peer sales, and direct sales of parts they didn’t stock. The marketplace business expanded service and parts availability for clients, and ensured Satair remained a one-stop provider for parts sales.

AI-powered CPQ

With more than 6 million customer support emails each year, many of which are request for quotes, Satair needed a quote response solution that would scale with its business. Merkle developed Lilly, an AI assistant trained on relevant data for producing quotes – tuned for experience as well as delivering accuracy. Lilly helped reduce the strain on customer service inbox, providing more than 450,000 quote emails each year.

The outcome

Satair’s digital transformation has brought the company in to the forefront of aviation commerce. Satair saw a 58.3% increase in yearly revenue, 51.4% increase in number of orders, and 76.7% increase in conversion rate on online orders on Satair Market.

In addition, Merkle and Satair received multiple accolades for our work, including:

• Silver in Business Transformation at dentsu’s Northstar Awards 2023

Danish Digital Awards:

• “Best in B2B”
• Gold in “Systems Platforms and Architecture”
• Gold in “Digital Transformation”
• Gold in “Commerce”