How did OnePlace start?

OnePlace was primarily established in 2018, in partnership with development company OpenECX, as an ordering portal for a single Supplier to trade with NMBS Merchants. After identifying the benefits of an online ordering system, for both Merchants and Suppliers, we began to develop the system to accommodate for a wider range of Suppliers to trade with Merchants.

As the platform began to grow, the importance placed on the quality of product data became strikingly evident. We became conscious that many NMBS Suppliers would benefit from having a central base to manage their own data. From this thought, the PIM evolved.

OnePlace, starting as a single Supplier sales portal, has since developed into an integrated PIM and ordering platform, optimized specifically for all NMBS Suppliers.

OnePlace Launches

The evolution of OnePlace began as the ‘NMBS Order Portal’ and was purely for Worcester Bosch to trade via. From here, the platform was opened up for multiple heating Suppliers to be able to trade with NMBS Merchants. The platform was then developed to cater for Merchant and Buying Group specific pricing. From then on, if a Merchant had a specific price with a Supplier, they would be have visibility of this prior to ordering. Once the data in the platform was specific to each Merchant, they then gained access to export a Suppliers data. This enabled Merchants to take product data in multiple formats from OnePlace and store this in their back office.

At this time, OnePlace saw a significant rise in Merchant usage but received feedback that the ordering process could be made more efficient. With this in consideration, we developed the option to upload an order file straight into the system. This reduced a large part of manual input and simply required a Merchant to click the submit button.

From this point on, OnePlace became closer to the platform we know today as, in 2020, the official name changed from NMBS Order Portal to OnePlace. The Marketplace feature of OnePlace was then built into the system. This enabled Merchants to search the range of products that were available to order and opened up the visibility of Suppliers to Merchants they had not previously traded with.  Alongside this, we created the option for Suppliers to display stock levels which provides more product detail to a Merchant.

Once the platform had the capability to hold all product detail, we started working on a way to help Suppliers improve the data that they had on OnePlace. From this thought, we developed the Health Check and Product Completion tool. These are aids to provide Suppliers with insights into the quality of their data and areas that could benefit form improvements.

Most recently, we have created the ability for Suppliers to view their product data in the form of a spreadsheet whilst still in the platform. This means that quick changes can be made to products and areas that are missing data can easily be identified.

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