Material Handling Systems rolls out a new corporate website

Remaining competitive in a changing market

MHS Global (MHS) is a full-service provider of innovative material handling systems that solve the challenges of distribution and fulfilment operations. MHS has a global installed base of over $5 billion for small to large distribution and fulfilment projects in a variety of industries, including e-commerce, parcel, third party logistics and outside integrators.

MHS has grown organically and through acquisition bringing together multiple brands that have strong reputations in different aspects of the material handling systems industry. This resulted in several different web sites and different platforms. MHS did not have an online presence for aftermarket parts support anywhere globally, instead supporting their customers via phone and email and non-digital channels.

To remain competitive in the market, MHS set a strategy to create a new web presence that will support multiple brands in multiple countries along with an aftermarket parts channel to better service existing and future clients. MHS chose Optimizely because the platform supports multiple brands, multiple languages and has strong content management, search and ecommerce capabilities in one platform.

Developing a digital approach

When it came to objectives, MHS have a clear approach in order to achieve a strong digital presence.

This meant developing a global web presence that told the combined story of MHS but allowed different brands to shine. By developing a global digital aftermarket parts channel to better service existing and future clients, they could support parts ordering that meets the needs of B2B customer’s, organizational goals, and individual requirements.

With a clear approach, MHS desired a unified platform that supported multiple brands and languages along with content management and commerce.

MHS, along with its partner Rightpoint, determined a phased approach to launching a new online experience. The first phase was to rollout a new corporate website. In choosing a platform, the team also considered the ultimate goal of also developing an after-market parts channel

The new MHS website was launched on the Optimizely Content Cloud. Through further competitor research and strategic analysis, the team created a roadmap in July 2019 to deliver an MVP experience for the parts catalog, built upon the existing corporate website using Optimizely Commerce Manager. In June 2020, MHS launched the first phase of the online parts catalog. Future phases to build out additional ecommerce features are being evaluated and refined.

MHS leveraged Optimizely's Digital Experience Platform as a platform-as-a-service (PAAS) model to take advantage of the Microsoft Azure Cloud to reduce complexity and be able to scale cost effectively.

As the industry and MHS continue to evolve, MHS plans to implement more advanced B2B commerce features using AI and other tools to even better service customers and continue to fuel the growth by a desire to be the best, not the biggest.