Enabling Omnichannel Capabilities with SAP in Retail
As retailers embark on their digital transformation journey, one of their goals is to provide a seamless omnichannel shopping experience for their customers. Even before COVID-19, most companies realized the growing importance of omnichannel strategies to improve customer loyalty. However, when the pandemic hit, retailers needed to proactively respond to the abrupt change in the behavior of consumers as they navigated the situation.
Many companies adopted buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS), drive-thru pick up, and curbside pickup, to continue to serve their customers safely. Today, customers still expect to have a seamless experience with these various channels. As such, every retailer must have the capabilities and strategic agility to respond to these customer dynamics across all sales channels consistently. In this piece, we discuss considerations for enabling omnichannel capabilities with SAP in retail and how retailers can ensure that adaptability and agility in today’s dynamic landscape.
SAP RETAIL
It’s critical that retailers leverage the right technology and tools to support them in achieving their omnichannel strategy. SAP Retail is an ERP that addresses the requirements of the retail industry, regardless of a retailer’s size, and supplies extensive features to manage all aspects of retail operations to support an omnichannel strategy.
SAP Retail can empower retailers to streamline their operations with multiple stores, optimize the supply chain, and fulfill order demand flexibly through optimal store-to-store integration, enabling them to quickly respond to evolving customer demands. One of the components of the SAP Retail suite is SAP Customer Activity Repository (CAR), which supports omnichannel strategy use cases through multiple components:
Multichannel Sales Repository: This feature allows retailers to collect data from all sales channels spread across multiple siloed applications. It has an audit feature to manage sales transactions coming from point of sale (POS) systems and gain real-time insight into sales performance, revenue, and gross margin across all channels.
Omnichannel Promotion Pricing and Management: This feature enables retailers to manage promotions across all channels from a centralized location and then distribute the promotions to the various execution systems (such as in-store POS, eCommerce solution, etc.) in a consistent manner.
Omnichannel Inventory Visibility: This feature provides retailers with centralized and real-time stock levels across all channels. This becomes the foundation of order fulfillment for all stores and how the warehouse will downstream the process seamlessly.
SAP CAR is the foundation that integrates transactional sales data spread across multiple applications and formats to support omnichannel sales and is just one example of how SAP can help retailers enhance their omnichannel operations to drive innovation and improve the customer experience.
If your retail organization is searching for an SAP solution to help with omnichannel capabilities or other retail challenges, Crescense can help. Reach out to our team to learn about identifying the right solution for you.
Written by Mary Ann Brown