SAP Delivers Real-Time Insight And Extended Planning With Merchandise Data

SAP NEWSBYTE - SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced new solutions to fast track retailers onto real-time analytics. The SAP Planning for Retail rapid-deployment solution enables real-time demand-driven forecasting and multi-year budget projections, while the SAP rapid-deployment solution for shopper insight delivers pre-built analytics powered by the SAP HANA platform in both mobile and Web formats. Retailers with limited resources that need to keep up with seasonal rushes or changing product demand can have these fully integrated analytics solutions up and running within seven to 12 weeks on average. The announcement was made at the SAP Retail Forum North America, being held in Dallas October 1-3, 2012.

Accurate and immediate retail data has become increasingly difficult to secure. The changing economy, customer fragmentation, erratic sale patterns and non-integrated IT systems all play a contributing role in obscuring a clean view into retail operations. SAP Planning for Retail and rapid deployment of shopper insight help retailers achieve fast and accurate visibility across channels and merchandise categories over an extended period of time.

SAP Planning for Retail produces detailed sales projections that can define corporate budgets three to five years in advance. With this foresight, retailers can better guard against overstock and shortage scenarios while offering a more enticing mix of products and prices per channel, per store.

"Retailing today is all about real-time data but many planning solutions cannot pull it off," said Barry Adam, solution director, SAP Planning for Retail. "SAP Planning for Retail is the ideal solution because it delivers pinpoint demand and financial forecasting out-of-the-box with end-to-end functionality. Retailers finally have a better option than using Excel as their principal planning tool."

The SAP rapid-deployment solution for shopper insight helps solve the delay that retail managers experience in accessing and analyzing sales, returns and other transactional data. SAP HANA provides sub-second rollup and interactive analysis of retail data not possible with traditional database technology. This data can be viewed though a mobile device for near-real-time analytics, accessible from anywhere.

SAP Planning for Retail and rapid deployment of shopper insight help ensure an implementation process with a fixed scope and fixed price. Leveraging preconfigured software encompassing SAP best practices, services and end user enablement, the assets help to support fewer risks, lower costs and a more predictable return on investment (ROI) for retailers. They can gain immediate access to real-time capabilities and, because the solutions are fully scalable, retailers can keep adding to them as needed.

"We are putting SAP innovation within the reach of retailers so they can achieve their full potential more quickly and easily," said Steven Birdsall, senior vice president and general manager, SAP Rapid Deployment solutions. "Rapid-deployment solutions distill and combine SAP's 40 years of experience with more than 195,000 customers and expertise across 24 industries into pre-configured, modular solutions. These packages offer industry-specific best practices and integrated business processes for a fast return on deployment."

From the SAP Retail Forum North America, SAP today also announced the SAP ERP Customer Order Entry mobile app. For more information and other announcements from the event, visit the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews and @SAPrds.