S/4HANA 1610 Use Case – Retail

In the retail industry, businesses recognise the need to become more effective when it comes to leveraging their retail store infrastructure and local inventory presence. E-commerce will continue to grow, so the integration of multiple order channels will provide retailers with a way to successfully challenge their pure e-commerce competition.

One of the biggest cost challenges: continuously increasing shipping costs (think of small parcel shipments) and transaction costs (think of returned goods). The market expects to see revised pricing and merchandising strategies to account for these fully-loaded burdened costs.

SAP addresses these challenges with the new SAP S/4HANA 1610 release. SAP S/4HANA offers functionality to solve upcoming market needs immediately and professionally with an intelligent and user-friendly retail solution. Combined with Real-Time Inventory, the solution helps your company decrease costs for overstocking or being out of stock, and also helps increase sales due to better understanding of your customers’ behavior.

Leverage key retail functionality in the core

The new SAP S/4HANA 1610 release allows organisations to meet specific retail industry needs in the digital economy. Retail Merchandise Management has been completely re-architected to take advantage of SAP HANA, and it is now also available for customers in other industries who have retail operations.

What do businesses expect from a modern retail solution: It should be so flexible that consumers can personalise their product in a website or mobile device, and instantaneously receive a confirmation with a delivery date. This means that the business applications must verify in real-time material availability, plant capacity, performance and availability, machine parameters, distribution channels, distribution capacity, product specifications, etc. Only then the consumer can receive a confirmation with an accurate delivery time. This is possible with SAP S/4HANA.

SAP S/4HANA transforms retail business processes

SAP S/4HANA lets your business with all core processes run in real-time for fundamentally higher performance. Innovation highlights for retail businesses, available with the latest SAP S/4HANA release, include:

• Marketing and Merchandising:

1. Harmonisation of “article” and “material” combined with the new user experience;
2. Unified concept of site, customer, vendor and business partner record

• Procurement and Private Label:

1. Increased efficiency in the procure-to-pay processes;
2. New analytical apps and spend key performance indicators;
3. Integration in the Ariba Network for purchase order and invoice

• Supply Chain:

1. Simplified data model for increased through-put and flexible analytics;
2. Elimination of locking and increased through-put for standard price utilising material ledger, so customers can use multiple currencies and valuation methods for different accounting laws such as GAAP

• Omni Commerce Customer Experience:

1. Monitoring of end-to-end order-to-cash process and taking actions for any exceptions, with information to resolve any issues