New Customer-Centric Solution from SAP to Help Retailers Improve Operations, Consumer Experience and Brand Perception

To help retailers better understand and act on consumer behavior in the fast changing retail market place, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the SAP® Customer Activity Repository application, a new retail data repository powered by the SAP HANA® platform. SAP Customer Activity Repository is intended to support retailers in becoming more customer-centric by bringing together customer, sales and inventory information from siloed applications.  A unified view of the customer shall help retailers drive consistent experiences across all channels and improve business efficiencies, profitability and brand perception. The announcement was made at the SAP Retail Forum North America, being held on October 7-9 in Dallas, Texas.

Shoppers are demanding more choice and richer content at all times, on any device. To meet demand, retailers must deliver more personalized content, faster and across all channels. SAP Customer Activity Repository aims to empower retailers with consumer insights by consolidating customer interactions from stores, online and mobile channels with insight from social media feedback such as Twitter or Facebook posts. The information shall act as the basis for a “single source of truth” to help retailers optimize branding, marketing, promotions, pricing, merchandising, inventory management processes and more.

“As consumers expand their shopping experiences across multiple purchase channels, retailers have an opportunity to engage more fully and provide more personal interactions,” said Lori Mitchell-Keller, global head, Industry Business Unit Retail, SAP. “This is a daunting task, requiring access to multiple databases and tools. With SAP Customer Activity Repository, retailers will have access to powerful consumer insights, be able to centralize critical business data and run reports instantly, and make better business decisions that support both sales and the customer experience.”

SAP HANA helps businesses make smarter, faster decisions through real-time analysis and reporting combined with dramatically accelerated business processes. As the backbone of SAP Customer Activity Repository, it is intended to deliver lightning-fast insight at a user-determined level of detail, helping eliminate the time needed to handle multiple data transactions in the point-of-sale (POS) transaction log, other sales channels and reporting systems.

“To present our brand to a growing base of digital natives and active sports enthusiasts, providing information right now is a key differentiator,” said Stephen McDonnold, CIO, PGA TOUR Superstore. “Utilizing SAP Customer Activity Repository and SAP HANA will allow us to provide instantaneous inventory availability, targeted promotions and cross-channel fulfillment to our on-the-go consumers.”

SAP Customer Activity Repository is intended to help retailers establish the foundational data that can be used to better understand customer demand and predict future buying behavior. Features such as real-time visibility into consumer sales data down to the transaction level are intended to enable retailers better understand what, when and where customers will make purchases. One consolidated data pool for all customer transactions across channels will support ease-of use and accessibility to the right information. Further, SAP plans to design better access to inventory levels, predictive models and analytics in the application for improved operational management. General availability of SAP Customer Activity Repository is planned for the first quarter of 2014.

MIBS Provides Healthcare Solution for Real-time Supply Chain Management Powered by SAP HANA

SAP Labs India today announced that MIBS Pvt. Ltd (MIBS), a SAP Startup Focus participant and “SAP HANA Startup Challenge” finalist has built LogipleX, a supply chain intelligence solution powered by SAP HANA. LogipleX leverages the real-time operational reporting capabilities of SAP HANA to develop efficient supply chain models for the healthcare industry.

 Organizations today face a variety of supply chain challenges such as increased pressure through global competition, heightened consumer expectations, and progressively complex patterns of customer demand. The healthcare industry faces specific challenges such as the the timely replenishment of drugs on demand at health centers and the need for an optimized delivery and distribution model.

 MIBS created a unique offering by integrating its domain expertise in the healthcare industry with the SAP HANA real-time capabilities into LogipleX, which covers different supply chain stages, from warehouse, procurement and inventory management, to distribution, billing and logistics. Additionally, LogipleX can be readily integrated with existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions to enable efficient business process management across enterprises of all sizes. By integrating LogipleX with SAP HANA, customers benefit from flexible analytical models that use both real-time and stored data to build increasingly proactive supply chain models for the healthcare industry. This enables the customer to map drug supply based on actual consumption, to provide real-time inventory access and to ensure effective utilization of warehouse resources and increased supply chain visibility for both vendors and distributors.

 “The healthcare industry faces technical challenges especially when it comes to drug delivery and replenishment which involves coordination between vendors and distributors. An effective supply chain that addresses these challenges can only be implemented through a robust information technology system,” said PV Mohanram, Senior Vice President, MIBS. “With the LogipleX supply chain intelligence solution powered by SAP HANA, we aim to provide the healthcare industry with the agility, visibility, and control to streamline and manage their supply chain in response to market conditions.”

MIBS is part of the SAP Startup Focus program which enables big data, predictive and real-time analytics startups to run better by developing innovative applications on the SAP HANA® platform, a cutting edge in-memory platform. The overall goal of the program is to spur innovation and provide startups with the technology, support, resources and community needed to port their applications to SAP HANA and go-to-market at no cost.