The Würth Group, a subsidiary of Adolf Würth GmbH & Co. KG, is one of the leading players in the development, production, and sale of fastening and assembly materials.
Connect across companies to build stronger supply chains and deliver on the customer promise Learn howThe company manages an extensive portfolio of more than 125,000 products. Despite its strong market position, digitalizing procurement across diverse customer environments remains a key challenge, particularly in e-procurement, where large customers often have very different requirements, even when market standards exist.
To address this, Würth recognized the need to better connect procurement processes and now collaborates closely with leading e-procurement systems and platforms. The company has driven the harmonization of customer processes and ensured seamless onboarding to SAP Business Network. At the same time, Würth actively supports its customers in harmonizing and digitalizing their own internal workflows.
As the world’s largest procurement platform, SAP Business Network enables more efficient procurement and automated order processing and provides end-to-end transparency across the purchase-order‑to‑invoice flow between Würth and participating customers. This scope involves purchasing orders, delivery confirmation, and invoices, with exceptions managed through clearly defined workflows.
Save time and boost efficiency: seven minutes saved per order
Manual processing of orders, sent as PDFs or via non‑integrated channels, creates disproportionate effort, especially in relation to the order value, since indirect materials often involve smaller order values with many order items.
With automation, Würth saves approximately seven minutes per order on average — approximately 490,000 minutes annually or about 8,167 hours. The platform enables digital order transmission, catalog exchange, and automated invoice matching, materially improving process efficiency.
Seamless customer purchasing journey
With around 3,000 sales representatives in Germany, more than 600 pick-up branches, and numerous on-site storage solutions, including automated dispensing machines, Würth offers customers a truly omnichannel purchasing experience. Through SAP Business Network, all these touchpoints can be seamlessly integrated, giving customers that adopt this approach full transparency, as every order becomes visible directly within their own system.
One construction industry leader worked with Würth to integrate dispensing machines and branch pick‑ups into SAP Business Network, digitalizing its procurement processes. This integration has largely eliminated manual activities in day‑to‑day order handling of standard processes. Exceptions are automatically identified and routed through defined workflows, while payment instructions are triggered once the purchase order, goods confirmation, and invoice are successfully matched.
Stronger supplier-customer partnership
Beyond operational savings and improved collaboration, Würth enhances the customer experience through near-real-time integration across procurement, invoicing, and logistics. Digitalized procurement processes help meet customer requirements more reliably and further strengthen the supplier-customer partnership.