Designing a B2B buying experience for Hitachi's sales partners.
Sales partners purchase industrial equipment from Hitachi Energy in bulk to later sell to customers on demand and fulfill orders.
I led the design of the improved storefront partner portal, including identifying and digitizing parts of the quotation process that remained offline.
Context:
A partner might buy dozens of configurable products for a customer tender. Price depended on the order, delivery terms, compatible components, and what a factory could fulfill.
That made the transaction a collaboration between two stakeholders: a sales partner assembling the order and a Hitachi account manager coordinating factories, engineers, and commercial terms.
Mapping the partner journey:
I collaborated with business partners in Germany, India, Thailand, and Australia while learning the configuration, pricing, and quotation process.
The journey map compared what partners were trying to accomplish with the touchpoints, constraints, and account-team activity behind each step. The storefront covered browsing and configuration, then disappeared as soon as the relationship work began.
Defining the quotation experience:
The roadmap proposed a quote button and an open text field. A partner could begin a request online, but every meaningful exchange after that would still happen offline.
A partial solution risked making the process harder to follow: the platform would show that a quote had started without showing what had changed, who was waiting, or whether the order was ready to place.
Designing the quotation conversation:
I separated quotation exchanges into structured requests, such as discounts or delivery changes, and the less predictable negotiation that followed. Comparable information needed structure, while counteroffers, explanations, attachments, and exceptions needed room for conversation.
The prototypes showed that a request form alone would preserve the email handoff, so I used them to make the case for delaying release and bringing the full quotation exchange into the portal. Product, engineering, and business leadership agreed; I kept item-level quotation in scope and cut batch actions and product recommendations to avoid another delay.
Designing item-level negotiation:
Bulk orders made a single quote-level form too blunt. A partner might request a delivery change on one item, a discount on another, and accept the remaining products as quoted.
I designed a flexible product tile that could hold configurations, add-ons, lead time, requested changes, and account-team responses without sending people through a stack of panels.
Designing configuration dependencies:
The same component model also had to carry configuration dependencies. When one selection required another component, the interface explained the relationship in context and blocked an invalid cart state.
Impact:
Nine to twelve months after launch, the business team reported two outcomes: deals were closing about three weeks sooner, and active opportunities went quiet less often.
Keeping each request, response, and pending decision in one place helped partners and account teams see what was holding up a deal and keep it moving.
What I learned:
The problem was widely recognized, but it did not reach the roadmap until the prototype made a solution tangible.
When I raised the gaps in the quotation process with business partners, I met very little resistance because they already recognized the problem, but the people responsible for the process had not raised it without a solution to propose. Once the prototype showed how quotation could work inside the platform, the team could evaluate something concrete and acknowledge the problem as work that belonged on the roadmap.