Commerce That Connects, Part 1: How Essity Built the Foundation for Scalable Digital Commerce

Scale often introduces complexity for global manufacturers. Therefore, serving millions – and in Essity’s case, touching the lives of roughly a billion people each day – requires a commerce strategy capable of delivering consistent, intuitive experiences across markets, channels, and customer types.

In a recent SAP CX Expert Exchange with Robert Holland, VP and Research Head at SAPinsider, Daniele Tedesco, E-commerce Global Process Owner at Essity, shared how the health and hygiene company is modernizing its go-to-market approach by connecting customer experience with a strong ERP backbone. Here are his insights in the first of this two-part series.

Designing Commerce for a Global Footprint

Essity operates across more than 100 markets with a diverse portfolio that ranges from medical products to everyday hygiene essentials. Supporting this breadth requires an omnichannel strategy that balances standardization with flexibility.

Tedesco explained that the company focused on creating a scalable template – a common framework with shared capabilities that could be deployed across brands and regions. By establishing a unified technology stack for both B2B and B2C channels, Essity positioned itself to execute faster while maintaining consistency.

The approach allowed the organization to tailor front-end experiences while relying on a stable, interconnected commerce engine behind the scenes. This flexibility ensured the business could adapt to local market needs without rebuilding its digital foundation each time it expanded.

Building the Foundation Before the Experience

Rather than treating commerce transformation as a standalone initiative, Essity aligned its customer experience overhaul with a broader ERP modernization and data strategy. Moving toward a cloud ERP environment, supported by strong product information management and master data governance, created the structural integrity needed for connected commerce.

This foundation has proven critical. According to Tedesco, clean structured data not only supported seamless transactions but also prepared the organization for emerging AI-driven buying behaviors, where discoverability increasingly depends on accessible and well-organized product information.

For organizations pursuing similar transformations, Essity’s journey reinforces a clear lesson: innovation at the experience layer is only as strong as the data beneath it.

Precision First, Then Speed

One of the company’s most strategic decisions was to invest time upfront in building a robust B2B template. While this deliberate approach required patience early on, it ultimately enabled significantly faster deployments.

After launching the solution in the United States across two business units, Essity rolled out a comparable capability in Canada within just a few months, a major acceleration compared to traditional timelines.

The impact was immediate. Enhanced order capture and reconciliation capabilities enabled credit card processing for smaller pharmacies, unlocking access to customer segments that were previously difficult to reach through conventional sales models.

Similarly, what once took six to nine months to launch a direct-to-consumer web shop can now be achieved in as little as six to nine weeks, demonstrating how repeatable architecture drives operational agility.

As organizations modernize their commerce architecture, building the foundation is only half the story. In the concluding part of this interview, Tedesco put the spotlight on how Essity is redefining customer expectations, particularly in the moments that follow the purchase, while preparing its commerce ecosystem for the future. Stay tuned to learn more.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

A strong data foundation enables scalable commerce. Essity aligned its customer experience transformation with an ERP and data overhaul, ensuring that governance structures and product information were established before scaling digital capabilities. For SAPinsiders, this reinforces a critical priority: without structured, reliable data, even the most sophisticated commerce platforms cannot deliver consistent experiences.

Standardization accelerates expansion. By investing early in a reusable B2B template, Essity created a framework that supports faster deployments across markets and business units. What began as a deliberate effort to build precision ultimately translated into measurable speed, allowing the organization to enter new markets more efficiently and reduce time-to-launch for digital storefronts.

Architecture should be designed for repeatability, not reinvention. Essity’s template-driven model demonstrates how enterprise commerce becomes sustainable when organizations avoid rebuilding capabilities for every region or brand. SAPinsiders pursuing global growth should view scalable architecture as a strategic asset that reduces operational friction and supports long-term agility.