Digital Edge — Where Should Verlinden Digitize?

A four-round, advanced B2B digital-strategy simulation set inside Verlinden Industrial Solutions NV, a EUR 184M Belgian manufacturer-distributor of industrial fastening, sealing and fluid-handling components (12% EBITDA, 3,200 accounts, 28,000 SKUs, 290 staff). On 11 March 2026 its single largest customer — Hanssen Food Systems, EUR 14.8M, 8% of revenue — issues a digital-readiness ultimatum: integrate via EDI/punch-out and expose live stock and pricing through an API by 1 September 2026 or be 'deprioritized' to a backup tier capped at 30% of category spend (a ~EUR 10.4M cut). Eleven further accounts worth EUR 41M (22%) have signalled the same mandate, the competitive RFQ win rate has slid from 41% to 33%, and two pure-play digital rivals undercut list price by 6-9%. Only 9% of revenue is digital versus a 28-35% sector benchmark. The board approves a fixed EUR 6.0M, 18-month transformation budget — one shot — and wants a recommendation in 90 days. Playing the B2B Marketing Director, you apply Steve Muylle's three-layer Competitive Digital Innovation lens (product / process / business model): (1) diagnose where the value proposition is eroding and which layer, if digitized, protects the 38-strong technical-applications moat rather than commoditizing it; (2) allocate the EUR 6.0M across the product layer (IoT data services, EUR 3.8M, 14 mo), the process layer (API/EDI + self-service portal + real-time pricing engine, EUR 2.6M, 6 mo, answers the Hanssen mandate), and the business-model layer (managed-inventory subscription, EUR 4.4M, 18 mo, highest margin but cannibalizing and unproven), funding a lead at depth plus a partial secondary rather than spreading bets; (3) set the 18-month digital channel mix, move field-sales heads from order-taking to solution selling, price the digital channel against assisted channels, and install a mechanism to defuse channel conflict with the 64 reps and protect the technical team; (4) defend an 18-month roadmap to the board, answer a live price-war curveball from a pure-play without surrendering margin, set 6/12/18-month adoption KPIs and a pivot trigger. The math rewards the process-first sequencing that beats the deadline, defending the moat over chasing price, peer-protecting reallocation, and KPI-governed adoption — and punishes the five classic errors: spreading the budget thinly, chasing the subscription margin first, reframing the crisis as a price war, digitizing the process while ignoring the sales force, and launching with no adoption KPIs. Final KPIs track Digital Revenue Share %, Moat Strength, Margin Health and Budget committed against the EUR 6.0M cap.