In B2B e-commerce, product search serves as the primary entry point for the entire procurement process. At FRICKE, over 70% of all purchases begin with a search query. This high volume represented both their most critical operational bottleneck and their greatest strategic opportunity for optimization.
As one of Europe's leading spare parts distributors, the FRICKE Group operates an international B2B platform through GRANIT PARTS. Managing a catalog of millions of items, their entire digital business model inherently relies on flawless search functionality.
About FRICKE:
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Successful Partnership Between FRICKE and neuland
The Strategic Challenge: Overcoming Core Search Limitations
The legacy search infrastructure suffered from severe technical and organizational limitations that bottlenecked growth:
High Developer Dependency: Any minor customization or tweak required direct code intervention by development teams.
Rigid Query Handling: The system lacked tolerance for complex, typos-heavy, or highly technical B2B search queries.
Zero Merchandising Control: The business team had virtually no control over product rankings, sorting logic, or relevance scores.
Suboptimal Search Relevance: Queries frequently returned inaccurate or completely inadequate product results.
For the e-commerce team, this created an unsustainable environment: a total dependency on IT resources, a lack of operational control, and mounting pressure to elevate conversion rates and optimize the user experience (UX).
Ultimately, the core challenge was not managing the sheer size of the massive product catalog, but reclaiming strategic control over how users discover products.
HOLMES: An Enterprise Search Solution That Adapts to Your Business
The solution required no risky, full-scale system overhaul. Instead, it focused on a strategic, high-impact optimization of the existing core search functionality.
Our Enterprise Search Accelerator, HOLMES, was engineered specifically to master complex B2B challenges. It delivers a highly flexible, robust, and high-performance framework that integrates seamlessly into legacy IT infrastructure and scales effortlessly alongside extensive product catalogs.
A Data-Driven, Risk-Mitigated Launch Strategy
To validate performance, HOLMES was deployed via a controlled, live A/B test. Up to 50% of the platform traffic was gradually routed through the new search engine, enabling data-backed optimization based on real-world user behavior.
Fully Customizable Solution
Data-Driven Configuration
Phased Deployment
The Results: Measurable E-Commerce Success
Following the highly successful live validation phase, HOLMES was fully integrated into GRANIT PARTS’ core operations. Based on these outstanding results, plans are already underway to scale the architecture across additional international platforms.
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Reduction in "No Results" Queries
Our product search is the most critical tool we have for driving product discoverability. HOLMES has managed to significantly improve search relevance for our highly specific part numbers, flawlessly handling complex combinations of numbers and letters. That was an absolute game-changer for our business.
Head of E-Commerce, FRICKE
Award-Winning Eco-Efficiency: The Blue Angel Certification for HOLMES
Beyond exceptional performance and architectural flexibility, HOLMES sets new standards in digital sustainability. It is the first commercial enterprise search solution in Germany to be officially honored with the prestigious Blue Angel eco-label for eco-friendly software design.
You can access the official public documentation regarding the Blue Angel certification here.
