SAP is offering new AI-driven capabilities to help retailers optimize business processes and drive profitability and customer loyalty.
These innovative capabilities, from planning to personalization, will provide retailers with holistic customer insights and data analysis to adapt and thrive amid rapid market changes, according to SAP.
“These AI-driven retail capabilities build on SAP’s industry-tailored, intelligent customer experience (CX) strategy, which provides companies with deeply integrated functionalities to enable their most critical business processes and customer journeys,” said Ritu Bhargava, president and chief product officer, industries and CX, SAP. “SAP’s composable architecture unlocks the creative potential of retailers, allowing them to cherry-pick capabilities tailored to their unique needs and rapidly innovate and respond to market demands, ultimately helping them to supercharge profitable growth.”
The new capabilities include SAP’s industry expertise and embedded SAP Business AI technology to deliver true end-to-end retail solutions. This integration produces more intelligent, personalized experiences for customers, as the best retail outcomes require great CX, according to the company.
Examples of some of the newest capabilities include:
- SAP Predictive Demand Planning: This solution will provide retailers with more accurate and longer-range demand forecasts across channels using a self-learning demand model. Besides enabling scalable, cost-efficient, high-volume calculations, it will offer precise forecasting and automatically identify and consider a variety of demand factors and external data.
- SAP Predictive Replenishment: SAP is adding store replenishment capabilities in a phased approach to its existing SAP Predictive Replenishment solution. The capability will replenish inventory in stores and distribution centers for an optimized, multilevel supply chain across flexible planning horizons. It will consider demand volatility, business targets, rules, and constraints to determine optimal order quantities with the lowest expected costs.
- Example use case: A grocer wants to establish a highly automated approach for replenishing yogurt to lower costs and waste while improving customer service. SAP’s new solutions will automatically forecast and schedule replenishment orders with the correct quantities for the right locations while keeping costs low. Business users can then review and accept intelligent recommendations and transfer to the procurement system to create purchase orders, as well as understand any issue, address it quickly and avoid problems in the future.
- SAP Order Management for sourcing and availability: With this solution, available now, organizations can determine the optimal sourcing strategies to deliver customer satisfaction and minimize fulfillment costs. Business users can configure strategies aligned to their unique goals, including delivery time, utilized capacity, cost to ship and shipments per order and then run simulations to test the strategies before implementation.
- SAP Order Management foundation: With this foundation, available now, business users can create omnichannel order flows that respond to business events, such as a fraud hold, delivery or in-store pickup activity, using an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop workflow automation tool. Additionally, retailers can customize event triggers based on their unique business processes, and the corresponding actions can take place within the order management system or relevant system of customer engagement.
- Example use case: A coffee retailer is offering its customers real-time fulfillment updates. SAP Order Management foundation ensures a streamlined operation, which efficiently coordinates with the required insights to fulfill customers’ needs, even in complex cases for various items, such as subscriptions, in-store pickup, and sourcing accessories. SAP Order Management for sourcing and availability also provides a centralized view of inventory to ensure customer demand is always met.
- TikTok and LinkedIn integrations for digital ads: The SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement platform now integrates TikTok and LinkedIn for targeted digital ads. Marketers are empowered to segment customers, quickly engage leads, optimize ad spend, boost acquisition and retention, enhance the omnichannel retail experience, and build trusted relationships for growth. Retailers can easily create, sync, and expand audiences; connect with consumers on preferred social channels; complement campaigns with personalized ads on TikTok and LinkedIn for conversion; and use data-driven insights to convert leads and reengage at-risk customers.
For more information about this news, visit www.sap.com.