SAP, world leader in enterprise business software, has announced an initiative to enable companies to achieve new levels of responsiveness in product development and customer service, leading to improved customer retention and longer, more profitable customer relationships.
"The SAP FOCUS initiative is particularly important to South African companies as it will enable them to successfully compete in an aggressive global market," says Simon Carpenter, product manager - logistics at SAP Southern Africa.
SAP FOcus on CUStomers (SAP FOCUS) helps enterprises manage the entire life cycle of their customer relationships, including marketing analysis and planning; identifying, informing and acquiring customers; order management; and customer service and support. SAP FOCUS was announced at SAPPHIRE `98, the company`s 10th annual user conference for the Americas, to some 15 000 delegates.
"Companies face three conflicting goals: building superior products, increasing operating efficiency and enhancing customer intimacy," says Carpenter. "The SAP FOCUS initiative serves these goals and helps companies resolve conflicts between them by bringing consistent information to the point of customer contact and customer and market insight to the enterprise.
"The initiative leverages new, existing and planned SAP functionality and components into three business scenarios - SAP Marketing, SAP Sales and SAP Service - to deliver a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) solution," he says.
Building on current offerings, new deliverables by year-end will include a sales force automation component, e-mail and Internet-based direct marketing, telesales and a call centre. In addition, SAP will deliver field service automation in 1999.
"This announcement once again illustrates SAP`s capability of continually evolving its customers` existing R/3 investments to take advantage of new technologies and management thinking," says Carpenter. "In this way, SAP provides solutions that enable companies to be innovative without incurring great risk to the business. And there is no doubt that the innovative application of technology to the business issue of CRM will be a key to survival and success in the future."
SAP is the ERP first vendor to provide customer-centric applications designed from inception to be seamlessly integrated with an enterprise execution system, enabling a real-time, interactive feedback loop between customers and an enterprise. This feedback loop is critical to customer retention, making it possible for companies to accurately and consistently forecast, manage and meet customer expectations.
Through common semantics, SAP FOCUS reflects a fundamental understanding of the challenges of seamlessly melding the transactional focus of customer service, the analytical focus of marketing and product management, and the relationship focus of sales.
"A key element is its inclusion of industry-specific functionality, interfaces and content, extending SAP`s already strong commitment to deliver solutions that best meet the diverse needs of its many customers in 17 industry segments," says Carpenter. "SAP has identified unique industry requirements for CRM. Examples of these include customer information for the utilities industry, key account management for the consumer products industry and sales force automation functionality for the high-tech, consumer products and pharmaceuticals industries, all part of SAP FOCUS 1998 deliverables."
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