Business Blooms at Fleurop through Ariba

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German floral retailer creates simplified, consumer-like shopping experience for corporate customers, boosting sales and use of flowers

SUNNYVALE, Calif., March 5, 2013 – Flowers are big business. And for Fleurop, the leading floral partner network with more than 7,000 stores in Germany, business is blooming. With the help of Ariba, an SAP company and the world’s business commerce network, Fleurop has established an efficient portal for its corporate customers, who now use flowers far more often as an emotional and personal touch in their communications.

“Online shopping isn’t just for consumers anymore. Businesses want to be able to buy things in the same fast and easy manner,” according to Achim Oberhauser, Team Leader, Corporate Service, Fleurop. “Through Ariba, we have created a new consumer-like shopping experience for our corporate customers with a fully automated process that is consistent with their purchasing policies, while at the same time offering the full flexibility and bespoke service of real stores. It truly is the best of both worlds.”

To enable this consumer experience, Fleurop joined the Ariba^® Network^™, the world’s leading and largest open trading platform, and implemented Ariba PunchOut^™ catalogs.

“We offer our customers tailored product catalogs with bouquets, plants, floral arrangements, and gift ideas, which can be filtered by price, category, occasion, and other aspects,” Oberhauser adds. “We can also offer highly life-like floral bouquets arranged according to a company’s corporate design. And the option to order free-text arrangements offers maximum flexibility for individual needs. And the best thing about our catalog is that customers can choose from 7,000 stores, and order their product from the store they know and trust. This significantly increases user acceptance.”

As a result of the automated process, Fleurop has greater transparency into orders and the invoices associated with them. Purchase order data is transferred to the system at the Fleurop head offices without any integration gaps, and sent to the relevant partner store for processing. Invoicing is executed centrally and automatically as a one-off electronic bill. Orders and invoices have fewer errors and the cost and time required to fill and process them has been dramatically reduced.

Fleurop’s customers benefit from this streamlined process, seeing efficiencies and, on average, savings of €35 in administrative costs per arrangement ordered.

“To succeed in today’s volatile and competitive economy, companies must find faster and smarter ways to connect and do business,” said Alex Saric, Director of Marketing, EMEA, Ariba. “And many, like Fleurop, are taking a page from the consumer playbook and embracing networks to collaborate around the entire buying and selling cycle in new and innovative ways that improve service and optimize their performance and profits.”

Nearly 1 million companies in 190 countries use the Ariba Network to discover, connect and collaborate with a global network of partners. Each year, these companies transact more than $450 billion in business, process 20 million in purchase orders and 60 million in invoices and send and receive access to 15 million new leads. For more information on the Ariba Network and the value it can deliver to your organization, visit http://www.ariba.com/community/the-ariba-network.

About Fleurop

Fleurop AG is based in Berlin, and has an impressive 100-year history. In 1908, Berlin florist Max Hübner has an ingenious idea: He decided that it was not flowers that should be sent on long journeys, but rather orders that should be sent to reliable local florists – the Fleurop concept was born. Today, some 50,000 partner florists in 150 countries around the world make up the global Fleurop network. The Fleurop principle applies worldwide: Each Fleurop greeting is handled and put together only by professional florists, and presented to the recipient personally. Worldwide, Fleurop partners handle over 25 million Fleurop greetings a year. Fleurop online: www.fleurop.de

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