Karhu is an internationally recognized brand of running shoes founded in Helsinki, Sweden in the early 1900’s.   Karhu’s success with many Olympic athletes and marathon runners over the years catapulted their product sales.  The development of Fulcrum technology in more recent years distinguished Karhu from other brands, further expanding their sales market.  Karhu running shoes include collections for men and women of various running styles and requirements.

 

Karhu has both retail and wholesale sales across North America and Europe, and carry both the Karhu brand as well as the Craft Apparel brand.  Karhu needed a simple web solution to a complex business environment.  They needed to process both B2C and B2B transactions, with multiple currencies, in multiple languages, and carry out operations across different countries. When looking into Sana Commerce, they discovered that Sana could handle both their B2C and B2B needs.  In addition, Sana was fully integrated with their fashion oriented ERP system, Microsoft NAV and Pebblestone Fashion. Setup within NAV was simple and fast.  With a few clicks entire product groups and specific styles can be seen or not seen within the web shops. ”The way Sana Software approached our e-business initiative shows their dedication and many years of e-Commerce experience” says Huub Valkenburg, CEO at Karhu.

Karhu’s B2B stores cover both North America and Europe.  They need the ability to feed the web shop customer specific information including pricing and currencies, in order to accurately process these orders. With Sana Commerce’s direct integration with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, all shops are fed with Karhu’s customer specific information and requirements.  Critical business logic is maintained in web order placement. In addition to customer specific information, Sana Commerce delivers inventory availability immediately as well as customer account information.  Sana creates a structured order entry process with a clear online overview of all products and their availability, which makes choosing the right product, color and size easy for customers.  Simple settings allow you to control how inventory availability is displayed, and the simple displays make business-to-business ordering fast. With just a few clicks, tracking current and historical order information is also simple.  The customer or sales rep can filter on open sales orders, shipments, invoices, and sales history on-line, to pull up exactly the information they need. ”Sana simply saves a lot of work. Since we have had modeled our business in NAV already, the web shops take away lots of manual processes”.

 

Karhu had previously invested in a web shop for their B2C business.  Although their B2C shop was not integrated with their ERP system, the effort and expense of starting over with an integrated solution was not an option.  When they looked into Sana Commerce for their B2B stores, they discovered that since the B2B shop integration was already in place, the extension for B2C was going to be relatively easy and efficient. 

 

When other vendors seemed incapable of delivering a good interface between Magento and NAV, Sana Commerce stepped up to the plate and was able to tackle the project in a way that was cost effective for Karhu.  Going forward, their current platform will be extending more and more, and will continue to be supported by Sana. Huub concludes: “The Magento case truly shows the value of Sana; the single Sana implementation now serves B2B shops for Karhu and Craft, meanwhile taking care of multiple B2C environments. We rely on the seamless integration with Dynamics NAV for  all online businesses”.