SAP has formalized its approach to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) by consolidating upon recent acquisitions and integrating these functions into its existing stack of database and data analytics technologies. In specific terms, SAP has now brought together acquisitions including Hybris (acquired in 2013 – CRM and commerce software), Gigya (acquired in 2017 – customer identity management technology used to manage customer profiles, preferences, opt-ins and consent settings) and CallidusCloud (acquired in 2018 – technology that links salespeople with information related to pricing, incentives & commission all linked to a firm’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems) — the combined sum of these parts will now be known as SAP C/4HANA. With SAP’s existing business suite being labelled SAP S/4HANA, the firm has obviously adopted the same naming convention replacing the S-for suite with C-for CRM. The company’s drive to build a more established CRM offering will see it go head to head against not just Salesforce, but a selection of established players in this space including Oracle, Dynamics 365, Verint, Pegasystems and others. Customer Experience division (the new SAP grouping that includes Hybris, Gigya, Callidus and other elements) president at SAP is Alex Atzberger. Suggesting that there have been four eras of CRM through the ages, Atzberger details them as:
Lamenting what SAP CEO Bill McDermott has called the “sales-only focus of legacy CRM solutions”, SAP thinks it can offer a new notion of CRM that exists in the 4.0 age. This is CRM that is more intrinsically engineered into (and integrated with) a customer’s wider software stack of applications and database management systems – and indeed the enterprise demand and supply chain.
In line with its new CRM offering SAP has also announced the SAP HANA Data Management Suite. This is software designed to combat what has been called ‘data sprawl’ resulting from firms who operate with highly distributed data that exists in lots of different locations, on different devices, on different platforms, in different states (structured, semi-structured and unstructured) and in different business workflows and business processes. The SAP C/4HANA suite will offer full integration with SAP’s business applications portfolio, led by the SAP S/4HANA ERP suite. Crowd-service: more help, from ‘any’ employee There’s one other add on here for customer service. SAP has also acquired Switzerland-based Coresystems AG to improve field-service customer experience, especially in the manufacturing, energy, high-tech and telecommunications industries. This software service provides scheduling for customer-service requests and uses artificial intelligence-powered crowd-service technology. SAP insists that this broadens the ‘service technician pool’ (those people able to fix any particular problem that occurs in a company during its working day) to include company employees, freelancers and industry partners. The ‘crowd service’ concept means that enterprises can assign the best-qualified technician (or person able to help) to each service call by taking into account expertise, location and availability.
The SAP C/4HANA portfolio includes SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Customer Data Cloud (including the acquired Gigya solutions) and SAP Sales Cloud (including the acquired CallidusCloud solutions). Additionally, SAP Sales Cloud unites the SAP Hybris Revenue Cloud solution and SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (comprised of SAP Hybris Sales Cloud and SAP Hybris Service Cloud solutions). The SAP Hybris name (along with other acquired firms noted in this story) will now be retired to consolidate under the SAP Customer Experience business unit. The real challenge here is… Whether the next generation of CRM actually results from one vendor firing pot-shots or thinly-veiled swipes at one another or not, the big question here will come down to implementation, integration and interconnectedness of the systems being built. As already suggested here, success in the 360-degree connected CRM world is a question of real end-to-end real-time synchronization between the demand chain and supply chain. That means using ERP and CRM — and a list of other favorite tech industry acronyms including Field Service Management (FSM), Human Capital Management (HCM), IT Service Management (ITSM) and more – and being able to access the data that resides in the clouds serving those functions. Unless we the humans can get access to the right data, in the right cloud services, serving the right business processes, in the right configuration patterns… then we won’t be able to physically get our developers to code the right functional ‘scripts’ into the codebases that run the so-called ‘smart’ (CRM or otherwise) applications of the future. There’s a gap in between pure theory and applied empirical success here and SAP will obviously now be working hard to make sure it has customer reference points to convince us that its vision holds water. Claims that CRM is dead and that we can now shout long live 360-degree ERP CRM require deeper analysis and the journey is just starting. This revolution will be televised. The post SAP Mounts Formalized CRM Drive appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/sap-mounts-formalized-crm-drive/
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Dimension Data has acquired a majority stake in e2y, a digital commerce consultancy firm based in the UK. The move is designed to strengthen the technology provider’s digital business solutions portfolio across the world, through the addition of digital commerce capabilities. Headquartered in London, e2y specialises in customer experience, project delivery and commerce, leveraging marketplace partnerships with SAP Hybris and Mirakl. “With the future of commerce being firmly focused on the experience of trading online, and our digital business solutions portfolio centred on driving innovation for our clients, our investment in e2y will bring our clients closer to their customers on these advanced commercial platforms,” said Scott Gibson, group executive of digital business solutions at Dimension Data. “It will also help us continue to guide our clients along their business transformation journeys. “The strength of e2y in the UK and Europe, combined with Dimension Data’s presence in the Middle East and Africa, the Americas and Asia Pacific, will open up new markets for our clients to leverage a truly compelling digital commerce solution.” According to Gibson, the provider will aim to leverage key capabilities across the advising, implementing and supporting of customers on a range of digital commerce platform solutions. “This adds a complementary set of skills to Dimension Data’s core value proposition around systems integration, managed services and specifically in this area providing services that add to digital infrastructure consulting and services proposition,” Gibson added. From a digital commerce standpoint, e2y provides consulting around SAP architecture and delivery, in addition to payment strategy and project management. Share this:The post Dimension Data acquires leading SAP digital commerce consultancy appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/dimension-data-acquires-leading-sap-digital-commerce-consultancy/ A conversational interface driven by AI will be the future of how you’ll access and understand SAP’s analytics cloud. The way end users interact with analytics applications is about to change to the point where many of them will no longer necessarily need to rely on someone from IT to generate a report on their behalf. At their recent 2018 Sapphire Now + ASUG Annual Conference, SAP announced Search to Insight, which makes use of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing engine to provide insights into data residing on the SAP Analytics Cloud. Providing that capability will change the way end users and IT organizations interact with one another daily. There will still be a need to run complex reports. But most of the report requests that previously required someone in IT to build a report will soon be handled by a simple voice request. That shift will require many analytic professionals to be retrained, says Mike Flanagan, senior vice president of analytics strategy for SAP. “Like most things involving AI, there will be some jobs that go away and others that are created,” says Flanagan. Those new jobs will be focused more on building more sophisticated analytics applications leveraging AI models. It takes a significant amount of time and effort to create those AI models and IT organizations will need to be able to aggregate enough data to make those algorithms effective. SAP is betting that one of the places organizations will opt to store that data is the SAP Analytics Cloud. The conversational interface SAP has developed leverages machine algorithms that SAP has developed under its SAP Leonardo initiative and chatbot technology that SAP gained when it acquired Recast.AI earlier this year, says Flanagan. Longer term, end users should also expect to see SAP employ machine learning algorithms to automatically alert end users about relevant trends that have become apparent by applying analytics to the latest data. To facilitate that process SAP has moved to embed the analytics libraries it developed for SAP Analytics Cloud directly into the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, the version of the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications that it delivers as a cloud service. Pre-built content and business logic for more than 20 SAP applications, including SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, and SAP S/4HANA is also being made available and SAP has committed to embedding all the capabilities of SAP Analytics Cloud across its entire portfolio. Each individual organization will need to determine based on performance requirements when to run analytics application code locally versus relying on REST application programming interfaces (APIs) to access a remote service such as SAP Analytics Cloud. But regardless of the approach, SAP is leveraging its investments in the SAP HANA in-memory database to deliver analytics in near real-time. Share this:The post SAP Applies Conversational Interface to Analytics appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/sap-applies-conversational-interface-to-analytics/ Adding to the challenge is the need to manage, analyse, govern and secure data being created and streamed from internet of things (IoT) devices operating at the edge of network in real-time. Such challenges are what SAP hopes to address with its Hana Data Management Suite that was unveiled recently at its Sapphire conference in Orlando earlier in June 2018. “Our customers use an average of six to eight clouds, including SuccessFactors and non-SAP clouds like Salesforce.com,” said Ken Tsai, SAP’s global vice-president and head of cloud platform and data management. “Although some cloud suppliers say you can store all your data in Amazon Web Services, that’s not possible unless you put your cloud applications in there.” With no way to consolidate all of an enterprise’s data onto a single platform for analysis, Tsai said there was a need to solve the data management problem from a different perspective. Rather than share data across different applications, he said a more efficient – and secure – way was to make metadata available to all applications from a central location. “Data security, privacy and governance should also be shared across systems whether you are using SAP or third-party applications,” Tsai said. “You can have your own data but its visibility should be shared, and that includes data queries and data models so you can potentially move workloads from one system to another or from on-premise to the cloud and back,” he added. The SAP Hana Data Management Suite is based on the latest versions of the SAP Hana business data platform, SAP Data Hub, SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services and the SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer Web application. By bringing together various data management capabilities – including master data management, data lakes and integrating real-time data pipelines from myriad sources – Tsai said the SAP Data Management Suite will address data management challenges from an integrated perspective, along with a consistent user experience. He added that the new suite, available on-premise and as a cloud service or hybrid offering, will also let enterprises anonymise data by adding noise to data queries. The post SAP outlines approach to data management appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/sap-outlines-approach-to-data-management/
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Privacy & Cookies Policy Go to Source The post Calling all SAP customers: here’s what you need to know about the new pricing model for Indirect Access appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/calling-all-sap-customers-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-new-pricing-model-for-indirect-access/ Epicor Software Corporation, provider of industry-specific enterprise software to promote business growth, has announced the EMEA and APAC winners of the 2018 Epicor Partner Excellence Awards program at a ceremony during its annual international partner summit in Prague. The global awards program, now in its third year, recognises partners that have successfully deployed Epicor solutions to achieve excellence in business efficiency, customer experience, and overall performance. In addition, partners who have excelled at growing their Epicor business through innovation and technology are also recognised. The awards enable Epicor to demonstrate its ongoing commitment to investing in and growing its international channel. They also showcase partners’ commitment to providing their customers with innovative solutions that help them grow their businesses. “Winning partners have demonstrated exceptional performance in market growth, customer satisfaction, total sales, and their overall commitment to our flexible, industry-specific solutions,” said Steve Murphy, chief executive officer for Epicor Software. “We are proud to honour their achievements in growing their Epicor customers’ businesses. Their hard work enables customers to compete and grow in today’s global economy, setting them up for success.” The following partners are 2018 Epicor Partner Excellence Award winners: Business Transformation AwardData World Solutions Ltd. for undertaking a project for Nadifinlo Plastics Industry Company Ltd. to digitally transform the business. By integrating Epicor ERP with a manufacturing execution system (MES) and other business processes and systems, Data World Solutions was able to prepare this automotive manufacturing company to deploy Industry 4.0 technologies across its two manufacturing sites and set the company up for growth. Customer Experience AwardTRU Business Solutions Pvt. Ltd. for reducing wastage and overhead costs, and delighting the management team at AT&F India Fabrication with an easy to use pre-configured Epicor ERP implementation tailored to fit the fabrication business. Rapid Time to Value AwardTap Consultoria for implementing Epicor ERP within two months for scene manufacturer Tecmolde SL, enabling them to see a measurable return on investment (ROI) within less than a year from go-live. Cloud DeploymentBiscit Pty Ltd. for its work in the aged care market with customer Port Stephens Veterans & Citizens Aged Care Ltd. Biscit worked to implement Epicor ERP SLS multitenant cloud to replace aging legacy technology and reduce a significant risk to the business. After a successful implementation, the customer is now well underway with its growth plans to build and integrate more facilities across Australia. Technology InnovatorRheinBrücke IT Consulting for developing the Epicor Payroll MEA solution as an Epicor Professional Services Industry extension, transforming its customers’ payroll functions by streamlining processes and integrating them with human resources (HR) and finance functions so that no manual intervention is needed. Rising StarMacroscoop for the rapid growth of its Epicor business, significantly increasing its sales of Epicor solutions in the last 12 months whilst successfully scaling its organisation to maintain high levels of customer service and satisfaction. Partner of the YearRheinBrücke IT Consulting for achieving the highest new license revenue of all Epicor partners over the past 12 months, and achieving the highest certification level of any Epicor partner worldwide. Product and territory expansion, with no compromise on quality delivery, were all key factors the judges commented on when making this award. The post Epicor recognises international partner success in the 2018 Partner Excellence Awards appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/epicor-recognises-international-partner-success-in-the-2018-partner-excellence-awards/ Solve for Happy Book Summary – Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer at Google X, was at the top of his career. Financially well off, with a job many would kill for and a loving family. And yet, despite all this, he wasn’t happy. Why? Like many others before him, Gawdat grappled with this question for years and, when suddenly losing his 21-year-old son during a routine procedure at a hospital in 2014, it deepened into a quest to discover what truly constitutes human happiness and how to stave off disappointment in life. By applying his analytical mind to the problem, and examining key ideas from many of the world’s religions, Gawdat finally arrived at his own happiness formula. This article layout Gawdat’s ideas on happiness; the illusions standing in the way of it, the many blind spots of your mind that cloud your vision from what life is reallylike, and the ultimate truths that will bring real joy and happiness into your life. We’ve all heard that money can’t buy you happiness, though many people are still driven to pursue financial success as their primary goal. It’s no wonder, then, that they find themselves unhappy even when they appear to have everything. But what can be done about it? This is the question Gawdat grappled with himself, so he decided to apply his engineer’s mind to figuring out a formula for achieving happiness. Let’s start by trying to understand what happiness is. Look at the semi-permanent joy of small children and toddlers and you could see that it is, in fact, our default state. Sure, it’s not all roses, but as long as they aren’t hungry or in pain, kids are generally happy. You could say that happiness is merely a lack of unhappiness. But where does unhappiness come from? According to the author, it comes about when life doesn’t behave the way you expect it to. Here’s the formula that he came up with: “Your happiness is equal to or greater than your perception of events minus your expectations of life” This means that when you regard life’s events as the same or better than your expectations, then you’ll be happy because the twists and turns of life don’t frustrate you. But if your expectations are greater than the reality, they’ll subtract from your capacity for happiness. Naturally, it’s not as clear-cut as this. You’re much more complicated than just happy or sad! Depending on the thoughts you allow to determine your expectations, your state of mind can range from total confusion to negativity and suffering, to positivity and happiness, all the way to absolute joy. The goal is to make that journey from the bottom to the top. To prevent yourself from becoming confused and unhappy due to the gap between your expectations and reality, you’ll first need to discard the six grand illusions that leave you misinformed. In the 1999 sci-fi film The Matrix, the main character, Neo, suddenly breaks through the illusion of the world around him and sees it as it really is – long green columns of ones and zeros – and is able to take control of himself and his environment. Like Neo, if you can see past the illusions, then you too can take control of yourself and your happiness. Start by shattering the first illusion which is that the voice in your head – the one that questions your actions and intentions – is the real you. In the 1930s, a Russian psychologist named Lev Vygotsky noted small muscular movements in the larynx accompanying inner thought, and suggested that the internal narrator was actually just the internalization of speech – a hypothesis confirmed by neuroscientists in the 1990s, when they found that parts of the brain active while talking are also active during inner thought. So the voice in your head is actually your brain talking to you as it tries to understand the world around you and make the best possible decisions. But it isn’t you. So when listening to your negative thoughts, remember that…… To Read Solve for Happy Book Summary sign up to Blinkist for free (Click here) Ever read 4 books in one day?The post 10-Minute Summary – Solve for Happy Book Summary – Mo Gawdat appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/10-minute-summary-solve-for-happy-book-summary-mo-gawdat/ One Channel, Africa’s fastest-growing cloud business solutions provider, has launched its Acumatica product for construction called One Build. This is an end-to-end cloud business management system for general contractors, home builders, subcontractors, specialty contractors and land developers. Acumatica One Build is a true cloud solution that can significantly lower the cost of doing business. It combines features like project and cost management with contracts, commitments, subcontracts, compliance, retainage and other industry capabilities. One Channel CEO Bernard Ford says Acumatica One Build offers full business process management (BPM) via its AcuFlow module which includes the ability to do sub-contractor payment certificate approvals and payment. AcuFlow allows organisations to automate their complex workflows across different corporate entities and existing installed applications, in order to extend the reach and value of Acumatica ERP. He says while Acumatica does have workflow functionalities, AcuFlow is designed specifically to handle complex business process flows. “For example, the system can execute complex procurement requests across two separate companies in two different currencies.” “It offers auto-procurement via AcuFlow directly from bill of quantities and can integrate other estimating systems. More importantly, it provides mobile device integration for all processes, supporting workers and management on-site,” he explains. Acumatica One Build was designed to address the needs and demands of modern construction companies. It utilises the Acumatica Cloud xRP platform and core application suites to also offer project accounting, compliance management, retainage, change orders, job costing, and document management. The post Cloud ERP Now Available For Building appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/cloud-erp-now-available-for-building/ Effective customer relations management is the very foundation on which the success of a business rests. Customers are the most critical factor in for functioning of a business. According to research by Google and CEB, customers emotionally connected with a brand are twice more likely to buy its products or services. Almost all these customers (and prospects) are present on social media today. Every minute, the internet sees 973,000 logins into Facebook, 38 million WhatsApp messages, 481,000 tweets and 174,000 scrolls on Instagram. These numbers are mind-blowing. And it shows how much brands are missing out on the opportunity to engage with their customers and prospects. On the other hand, businesses that leverage social media and make it part of their client relation strategy, enjoy much larger benefits. Social media offers a goldmine of information about customers and prospects. So, social media CRM tools give a business the edge over its competition by empowering it to delight its customers and prospects. Here are 4 ways in which social media makes a company’s CRM more intelligent and effective: Marketing and sales are not all about trying to get new customers. They’re about fostering current relationships, constantly adding value to your customers and creating top-of-mind awareness. In today’s age, the customer wants to be educated and engaged with instead of being sold to. That’s why it’s important to track your customer’s journey on each stage, and respond to him accordingly. Integrating social media as part of CRM helps you track this aspect and identify how you can eventually convert one-time buyers into advocates. An integrated engagement platform An intelligent CRM tool with social media integrated in it allows your team to have access to all the customer and prospect insights and information in a single location. Share this:The post How to use social media to make your CRM more intelligent appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/how-to-use-social-media-to-make-your-crm-more-intelligent/ These and many other fascinating insights are from two research notes from Cowen published on May 29th, Cowen IT Spending Survey: Positive Momentum Continues and Takeaways from Cowen’s IT Spending Survey On Apps, Database, and Analytics (both client access reqd.) The Cowen IT Spending Survey was conducted during April & May 2018. It’s the largest the firm has ever completed, interviewing 157 senior IT professionals across key industries with material IT budgets. Respondents are limited to senior technology professionals with roles including CIO (31%), CTO (27%), Chief Data or Digital Officer (4%), and Senior IT Management (38%). In aggregate 62% of total respondents are in technology C-suite roles. Industries represented include Communications & Media (34%), Financial Services (24%), Healthcare (10%), Consumer Packaged Goods and Retail (8%), Auto & Manufacturing (4%), Business Services (4%), Energy & Industrials (4%), Real Estate (3%), Food & Beverage (1%); and Other (6%). Please see pages 9 and 10 of the Cowen IT Spending Survey: Positive Momentum Continues and Takeaways for additional details on the methodology. Key takeaways from the study include the following:
Share this:The post Spending On CRM Apps Predicted To Soar In 2018 appeared first on Statii News. from http://news.statii.co.uk/spending-on-crm-apps-predicted-to-soar-in-2018/ |
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