Andrew and Paul,
Our team spent some time looking across the Douglas Dynamics digital footprint, including several of your brand sites, and from the outside alone noticed a few opportunities to strengthen your digital commerce. There seem to be several places where customers are being asked to work harder than they should, whether that means falling back to phone and email, hitting stalled digital paths, or taking extra steps to get where they are trying to go. I realize these may not all sit with the same team or roll up to the same owners, but I thought I would share. Below are a few examples.
Create a smarter self-service path for Henderson Parts
Henderson makes parts support easy to reach, but the public path appears to rely on phone and email for identification and next steps. Layer One can help turn that process into a searchable, data-driven parts experience that connects product information, customer intent, and support workflows, giving buyers faster answers while helping your team see where demand and friction are showing up.
Get the Dejana eStore Selling
Dejana has a public eStore path, but it has displayed an under-maintenance message for a couple of months and currently sends customers back to phone support. Layer One has deep experience stabilizing and advancing eCommerce environments, including stepping in when digital commerce initiatives have stalled, become unreliable, or failed to reach a usable launch state.
Quote without a separate PDF upload for Fisher and Western
FISHER and WESTERN appear to send customers through a fitment workflow that produces a selector PDF, then ask them to upload that PDF separately when requesting a dealer quote. Layer One can help turn that journey into a single structured flow where fitment results become usable quote data, making the process easier and less repetitive for customers.
Just like butter is one of the most versatile and important ingredients, carrying flavor, creating texture, and bringing everything together, Layer One improves nearly every part of your digital commerce stack. We help the pieces work better together, smoothing friction across product data, search, integrations, user experience, and channel performance. The result is a stronger foundation, a smoother operation, and better outcomes across the whole experience.
The suggestions above come from what we could see as an outside visitor. But in our experience, much of our value in turning B2B platforms into working systems lives beneath the surface, in product data, integrations, internal workflows, and strategic decisions that customers never see directly.
Sometimes our team of domain expert consultants and developers solve those issues through bespoke work. Other times we bring accelerators that can be customized. Here are two I thought might be interesting for Douglas Dynamics.
Poor results and multiple search bars frustrate users.
Intelli-Search unifies your site, product catalog, PDFs, and technical content into a single intelligent search experience. Buyers and engineers find what they need instantly, while your team gains a fully optimized search system that improves usability and conversions.
Rebuilding product data after creating catalogs wastes time and resources.
Most manufacturers still rely on their polished PDFs as the closest thing to a single source of truth. Layer One’s Catalog Data Extraction tool analyzes, extracts, structures, and normalizes that information into clean, channel-ready data, ready to feed your PIM, distributor networks, and eCommerce platforms. You get a configurable tool and expert setup that transforms your existing catalogs into a sustainable, repeatable data pipeline for every channel.
We have a lot of experience helping manufacturers where responsibility is spread across multiple brands, teams, and priorities. And the ideas on this page are only a starting point. Most of our strongest client relationships began with curiosity about one issue. Then once the conversation started and they recognized our breadth of experience and understanding of how digital commerce, product data, and connected systems work together, it quickly opened into more important priorities and those became the first things we solved.
So we would like to offer you a complimentary 45-minute working session to get a feel of what working with us is like. If the examples above point to a broader conversation around how different digital experiences, teams, and priorities connect, that is usually where we do some of our best work. Or we can talk through anything else your team is currently tackling or avoiding. No prep needed, if you don't believe us, you've got nothing to lose (we promise not to hound you after the call)!
Just shoot me an email with a few times that work for you!
Thanks much, Adrian
Layer One aligned disparate information and systems across our environment, including our commerce site. They brought structure to a complex, multi-brand experience and made it usable.Scott GarrettDirector of Global Digital Customer Engagement, Nidec
