SAP CRM: Momentum followed by innovation

Today I attended the SAP CRM Virtual Influencer Summit to get an update on SAP’s CRM practice. I love the virtual approach for analyst summits as I have access to all the content without having to lose a day flying somewhere.  Here are some updates:

• Twitter integration. SAP unveiled a CRM Twitter Solution that pulls in Tweets and performs sentiment analysis, so you can take action on negative comments automatically.

SAP Twitter integration with sentiment analysis

• Volker Hildebrand, VP CRM Product Management, CRM. Talked about complete redesign of SAP CRM to make it easier to use, implement and consume.  As I’ve said previously, it is great to see SAP deliver highly usable applications, a critical component for high-volume CRM users. Service line of business includes innovation areas of social media integration, mobile service and “next generation” of online self-service (more on this later).

New UI design for SAP CRM

• Volker also highlighted a great example of a partner innovation. iCoop in Coop, Switzerland, the leading regional electronic market-place for groceries and consumer goods, worked with SAP partner Schweiz AG to develop an iPhone application to order the entire food and wine selection from coop@home, integrated with iCoop’s SAP ERP system.

• Andy Main, SAP CRM Champion at Deloitte. Andy says Deloitte “Fast Forwards” the typical development project with preconfigured solutions for specific industries/verticals that cuts time and cost of CRM implementation. Time to implement has gone from 9-15+ months to 2-6 months, with costs starting at $300K.
• Amit Venugopal, Board Member, ecenta. SAP global solution partner, has completed over 80 successful CRM deployments. Amit says thanks to SAP CRM 7, Deployment times as short as 2 months, improved performance with new UI, reduced TCO with new tools to enhance/maintain application. Case studies include Varian Medical Systems, Sony Canada, eBay in Europe.
• Customer case study: Investools. Brian Weaver, Fred Johnston, and Mukilan Mohan from Investools. Offers investor education for self-directed investors. Went “big bang” on SAP CRM in 2007, wanted an end-to-end solution. 500 users across sales, inbound/outbound call center, workshop teams in the field, order processing. Interaction Center integrated to Genesys for Outbound CTI.
• Sybase-SAP Mobility Co-Innovation Partnership Overview. Mike Munro and Senthil Krishnapillai from Sybase. Announced partnership earlier this year to collaborate and deliver SAP business suite on mobile devices/platforms, including iPhone and Windows Mobile, using Sybase Unwired Platform and SAP NetWeaver Mobile.  “Business Workplace Inbox” allows mobile centric workflows for CRM. SAP CRM app now available on iPhone app store. Requires SAP Unwired Platform plus application license.

SAP CRM iPhone Application, developed with Sybase

• Syclo: Mobile Software Innovator. Syclo is a 14 y/o mobile software company, focused on utilities, life sciences, oil & gas, CRM field service and enterprise asset management. Third member of SAP co-innovation program for partners. Syclo’s Agentry Platform lets you centrally configure and manage mobile applications without writing code. Demo of SAP CRM running on Motorola Symbol MC75 Wireless Enterprise Digital Assistant, a typical field service tech device.

• SimplyBox. Contextual collaboration around structured and unstructured content. SimplyBox takes nuggets of information from across the enterprise or Web and embeds it within an SAP CRM screen to enable sharing/collaboration.  As an example, the demo showed that while looking at an Opportunity, a sales rep sees a Business Week article about the prospect and can have a chat conversation within the SimplyBox panel. You can easily ‘grab’ content off of any screen and drop it into a collaborative conversation. Very cool stuff–it may finally get sales reps to use SFA. 😉

Embedding SimplyBox collaboration within SAP CRM

• Dan Snider, Securit, world’s leading records management and document destruction vendor (“Shred-it”).  Securit is an SAP customer, they went live on SAP ERP in 2006 and later added CRM. Selected SAP for power of integrated solution, including seamless customer experience, data management/quality, the business user experience, TCO and leading edge BI solutions. System landscape includes automating entire quote to cash process, including mobile apps for sales and service reps and the SimplyBox partner solution for collaboration. They are using the SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe, a PDF document with editable fields and workflow, all captured within SAP CRM. Service routing improvements: 5-15% improvement in mileage driven, truck utilization and overtime.

 

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Tags: CRM, SAP, SAP CRM, TSIA

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