Global inter-enterprise business solutions player SAP is enabling Digital Wellbeing, a major e-business venture from UK-based companies Boots and Granada Media, to become Britain's leading e-business for health, beauty and well-being.
"Health and beauty are two of the world's largest growth markets," says Greg Chamberlin, product manager CPG/ Retail at SAP Africa. "It makes economic sense to capitalise on this growth and setting up an e-business seems a lucrative way to do so."
Digital Wellbeing, a new Internet and broadband company jointly owned by The Boots Company and Granada Media, is to use mySAP.com as the primary backbone for business infrastructure. It will launch an information and transactional website together with an interactive digital television channel in March 2001.
The new venture will tap into a health and beauty market which in the UK alone, excluding the National Health Service, generates sales of around lb11 billion a year. The mySAP.com solution will enable the management of the 10 000 products, which will be available from day one of the launch. Following that, the number of products are due to rise rapidly.
"We needed software that could cope with and maximise the massive scale of our future operations," says Richard Holmes, Digital Wellbeing. "SAP is a trusted name in e-business and the mySAP.com solution was able to provide a rock-solid, scalable infrastructure, which was easily adaptable to our different new media platforms."
The new business will allow customers access through a digital TV channel carried on the major platforms, with the ability to e-mail and telephone through to a live studio for information and advice. Over time this will be integrated with the website as broadband technology develops.
"Digital Wellbeing is an impressive combination of two market leaders' expertise - the company is sure to be a household name in the near future," says Chamberlin. "The mySAP.com platform will give a stable and reliable platform for Digital Wellbeing to capture their new media market leadership.
"We foresee similar e-business ventures utilising the mySAP.com solution to take off in Southern Africa in future," he concludes.
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SAP
As the market leader of inter-enterprise software solutions, SAP is leveraging its strength in industry-focused business software and the world's largest enterprise software customer base to deliver mySAP.com. mySAP.com provides an open collaborative business environment of personalised solutions on demand. This enables companies of all sizes and industries to fully engage their employees, customers and partners to capitalise upon the new Internet economy.
mySAP.com allows people to harness the power of the Internet to work smarter better and faster by optimising supply chains, managing strategic relationships, reducing time to market, sharing virtual information, and increasing productivity and shareholder value. SAP is listed on several exchanges including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE under the symbol "SAP." The SAP World Wide Web site can be found at http://www.sap.com.
Local subsidiary, SAP Africa has more than 281 installations throughout southern Africa, 30 SAP consulting and hardware partner, approximately 1 500 SAP consultants and branches in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth. The company also has five offices outside of South Africa and customers in Kenya, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Uganda, Mauritius, Mozambique, Angola, Gabon, Senegal, Reunion, Canary Islands and Botswana.