Redesigning a global ingredient ordering portal for Givaudan — the world's largest flavour & fragrance company — to streamline procurement for enterprise clients across 180+ markets.
01 — CHALLENGE
Givaudan's B2B ordering portal had been built incrementally over many years, accumulating layers of legacy functionality that served internal processes more than user needs. Enterprise procurement teams — responsible for sourcing flavours and fragrances for food, beverage, and cosmetics products — faced a portal that required extensive training, lacked intuitive search and discovery, and made bulk ordering workflows frustratingly opaque.
With clients ranging from nimble boutique brands to Fortune 500 CPG companies, the portal needed to serve radically different user types with equally different needs. High-volume buyers wanted speed and batch efficiency. New clients wanted guidance and discoverability. Neither group was getting what they needed, and Givaudan's customer satisfaction scores for the digital ordering experience were lagging significantly behind their product reputation.
"I've been ordering through this portal for three years and I still have to call my rep when I want to reorder last quarter's formulation."— Enterprise Procurement Manager, Research Participant
02 — RESEARCH
B2B portals serve a fundamentally different set of mental models than consumer experiences. Users aren't browsing — they're executing against a known need with specific constraints around compliance, quantity, and approval workflows. Our research had to account for this complexity, including the fact that "the user" is rarely one person but a chain of stakeholders across procurement, R&D, and finance.
19 procurement managers
Observed users completing real ordering tasks in their work environments to understand workarounds, approval flows, and the full procurement context surrounding portal use.
6 client organizations
Mapped the procurement workflow across roles — identifying who initiates orders, who approves them, and where the portal's role begins and ends in each client's process.
12 months of data
Analyzed portal usage logs to identify common search patterns, abandoned cart behavior, and the points where users exited to contact Givaudan's sales reps directly.
03 — PROCESS
Given the multi-stakeholder nature of B2B procurement, we created a cross-functional journey map that tracked three distinct user roles — the Researcher, the Approver, and the Buyer — through the full ordering lifecycle. This revealed the handoff points where information was lost, approvals stalled, and frustration peaked. From there, we ran focused design sprints on the three highest-impact problem areas: search and discovery, reorder workflows, and approval visibility.
04 — SOLUTION
The redesigned portal centers on three breakthrough experiences: smart reorder (one-click repurchase of past formulations with quantity variance controls), intelligent search (faceted filtering by application category, regulatory region, and minimum order quantity), and approval workflows (a visual pipeline that shows exactly where an order sits in the approval chain and who needs to act next).
We also introduced a "formulation workspace" — a dedicated area where R&D teams could browse, compare, and shortlist ingredients before handing off to procurement for ordering. This addressed a critical gap in the existing flow where the research and buying tasks were handled by different personas with no shared context.
One-click repurchase of exact previous formulations, with quantity adjustment and regional compliance checks built directly into the reorder flow.
A shared R&D-to-procurement handoff environment where ingredient shortlists can be built, annotated, and converted to purchase orders without losing context.
Visual, role-aware approval tracking that shows each stakeholder exactly what needs their attention — eliminating the status ambiguity that drove phone calls to account managers.
05 — RESULTS
The redesigned portal launched to a pilot group of 40 enterprise clients before a phased global rollout. Reorder completion rates rose dramatically as the smart reorder workflow eliminated the need for sales rep involvement in routine repurchases. Cart abandonment on bulk orders dropped significantly, and customer satisfaction scores for the digital ordering experience improved by 31 points over the previous benchmark.
06 — LEARNINGS
Unlike consumer UX, B2B mistakes have professional consequences. Users aren't just frustrated by friction — they're at risk of ordering the wrong formulation, missing compliance requirements, or holding up an entire product launch. Design for that weight.
Mapping multi-stakeholder workflows uncovered a completely different set of design problems than studying individual users in isolation. The handoff between the Researcher and the Buyer was the single biggest source of friction — and it was invisible until we mapped the whole journey.
In consumer apps, delight often comes from unexpected moments of personality or surprise. In B2B tools, delight is the absence of friction. When users can complete a task they've done a hundred times in half the time, that's the emotional payoff.