In a move demonstrating its commitment to its global e-Commerce rollout, inter-enterprise software player SAP today announced an initiative enabling its customer base to become e-Commerce enabled within days.
Through its e-Commerce Starter Pack initiative, SAP is providing businesses with a combination of software and services that will enable them to leverage the power of the Internet for buying and selling within a matter of days rather than weeks.
South African businesses will be among the world's first to take advantage of this starter pack. SAP Africa, in line with its active involvement in SAP global initiatives, is one of the first subsidiaries to be offering the e-commerce enabler.
"It is critical for South African business to get e-Commerce enabled - both from a perspective of the global economy and pure business benefits," comments Simon Carpenter, general manager: mySAP.com components at SAP Africa.
"Cost savings achieved through buying over the Internet are enormous. A study last year by US based W.W. Grainger, Inc. reveals buyers implementing business to business (B2B) procurement are projected to have an annual return on investment (ROI) of 339 percent. Importantly, the cost to process these B2B e-Commerce transactions is 22 percent less than traditional phone, fax or EDI."
Carpenter says if one breaks down the cost savings, acquisition transaction costs, including order processing, receiving and payment processing fall by 32 percent on average, while actual product costs, through reducing out-of-system purchasing, can be cut by 5 percent.
"One of the high expense areas of procurement is carrying costs as these involve cost of capital, personnel and space allocated for storing and issuing material. As procurement over the Internet reduces cycle-times, companies can reduce this by 25 percent on average."
He says with savings like this, it is not surprising Forrester Research predicts 55 percent of the worldwide procurement market, estimated to be worth some $59-billion, will be handled via the Internet by the end of 2000.
"Many companies realise the need to become e-Commerce enabled but are not sure how. Implementing our e-Commerce Starter Pack gives our customers the ability to gain the advantages of e-Commerce quickly, easily and with minimum resource requirement," explains Carpenter.
The pre-configured e-Commerce Starter Pack bundles the mySAP.com buying solution (SAP Business-to-Business Procurement), mySAP.com selling solution (SAP Online Store) and the mySAP.com Workplace, with consulting services enabling businesses to start leveraging the Internet in as little as six days.
The implementation of the e-Commerce Starter Pack creates the ideal platform for linking up to the mySAP.com Marketplace, the SAP electronic business hub that enables companies to quickly benefit from one-step business processes that execute multiparty transactions with a single click.
"We realised a crucial factor impacting companies moving to the Internet is the concern over skills. Therefore, as part of our Starter Pack and through alliances with our business partners as well as our own consultancy base, we're providing five to ten man days initial consulting services, facilitating the accelerated implementation of a fully-fledged live e-Commerce system," says Carpenter.
In South Africa, two implementation business partners are already part of the initiative, namely Spearhead and PricewaterhouseCoopers (Western Cape). As demand increases, so SAP Africa hopes to expand the involvement of its powerful and extensive business partner base.
"We are committed to providing e-business solutions which customers can implement quickly to start getting an immediate ROI. Through the e-Commerce Start Pack, customers can experience best-of-breed e-commerce functionality, realise significant cost savings, and provide a deeper visibility and control across the entire procurement chain."
In addition to electronic procurement capabilities, customers can open a Web-based sales channel, with SAP Online Store, to sell products and services directly to consumers or other businesses. Quick and seamless integration with SAP R/3 back-office functions is guaranteed through the preconfigured interfaces. Furthermore, the role-based mySAP.com Workplace brings a personalised touch to users and provides them with portal access to all necessary information to allow them to increase daily productivity.
Share
mySAP.com
mySAP.com is the Internet solution that connects employees, customers, suppliers and business partners as if they were all in one company.
mySAP.com is the open, collaborative Internet solution for the new world, ready today to unleash the ultimate power of the Internet: People in different enterprises and their customers working together as one.
SAP business solutions have enabled integration within thousands of single organisations: now mySAP.com delivers collaboration to entire markets by spanning enterprise boundaries.
This new way of doing business is called collaborative business (c-business).
c-business enhances service while offering new business opportunities, eliminating costs, and delivering real-time satisfaction for all concerned.
mySAP.com delivers these benefits through four key elements:
- mySAP.com Marketplaces are business hubs on the Internet that provide a collaboration infrastructure for c-business. Hosted application suites provide c-business solutions. Dedicated communities help organisations quickly find products and services and join their customers, suppliers and business partners in c-business processes.
- mySAP.com Workplaces are enterprise portals for empowering all the employees, customers, suppliers and partners of a company. They enjoy a highly personalised, single point of Web-access to everything they need in their business role to get the job done easily.
- mySAP.com Business Scenarios combine intra- and inter-enterprise services, information and application components. These form collaborative business scenarios in the areas of e-Commerce, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, Business Intelligence, and Enterprise Resource Management.
- mySAP.com Application Hosting reduces the risk, time and investment needed to participate in c-business. An application service provider ensures a whole software solution or parts of it are provided to a company as a service over the Internet - the enterprise does not need run the software itself and consequently saves investments in hardware, maintenance, and system management.
mySAP.com is built on the Internet-Business Framework, which provides an open solution architecture with the flexibility, scalability, performance and robustness essential to serve as a reliable integration platform, especially across enterprise boundaries.