Nowadays, shoppers are more knowledgeable, empowered, and connected to each other than ever before. They rely heavily on the Internet to conduct pre-purchase research, regardless of what channel they ultimately use to buy.
Shoppers also demand sophisticated products and consistent experiences that are different from the rest and as unique as their personality, across both physical and digital worlds.
While meeting and surpassing customer’s expectations, retailers have to control costs and improve operating efficiencies. This requires real-time, enterprise-wide insight into inventory as well as a revamped supply chain serving multiple fulfillment channels.
Why SAP solutions?
To address these challenges, SAP has responded with a broad range of innovations that help retailers simplify and standardize. Retailers can now seize the opportunities and innovate faster to:
- Understand customers better
- Engage whenever and wherever customers prefer
- And deliver what their customers want, when and where they want it
What is the technology behind SAP for retail that helps meet the industry’s challenges?
- One of the innovations is our SAP HANA in-memory database technology. SAP HANA, coupled with a retail data foundation, delivers real-time information across the enterprise and helps responding to customer’s needs and to the business demands.
- On the other hand, SAP and hybris are powering the future of commerce and customer engagement, while mobile solutions mobilize your shopper experience, your stores, and your entire value chain.
- Furthermore, our new SAP Fiori interfaces engage and empower employees and store associates like never before.
- Retail-specific content and preconfigured business processes simplify and standardize implementations.
- And last, but not least, the Cloud solutions simplify deployment and scale rapidly for quick ROI.
Retail innovations in action
1. An international retailer with many stores and multiple web sites was struggling to ensure the right stock coverage. This led to loss of sales, negative press and disappointed customers. With SAP HANA and SAP Customer Activity Repository acting as one single inventory hub for real-time visibility across all locations, the company targets to improve service levels to98% and synchronize marketing and merchandising activities for successful product launches.
2. The driver for a home improvements retailer was to improve customer service and increase purchase value. With the implementation of Sybase Unwired Platform, sales staff with mobile devices offer one-to-one attention by capturing customer requests in real time and checking product availability. The project went live in only eight weeks, and the benefits include 50% improvement in customer service.
3. A European department store chain needed to improve efficiencies in the supply chain, driven by higher production cost and rising raw-material prices. After implementing SAP HANA, the company can now generate a slow-seller report for the entire product line in 17 seconds. Employees obtain information 98% faster, decisions can be made on up-to-the-minute data, leading to better inventory decisions, a stronger bottom line—and happier customers .
We have many, many more stories from our unmatched customer base. In retail, 208 of the top 250 global retailers run SAP, and more than 12,200 other customers run better with SAP solutions.
Come find out more at sap.com/retail and please follow us on Twitter - @SAP_Retail, for the latest news in the industry.
You can watch the detailed video here.