SAP unit speeds up tracking of support engineers
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In a bid to improve service, TomorrowNow will announce Monday a wireless system to better locate its employees.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP continued to ramp up its on-demand CRM offering this week, announcing that it will now include service-level capabilities, the third key component of CRM solutions. In February SAP kicked off its software as a service business with a sales force automation solution. In May the company added marketing, and in its third update within the year it is now announcing SAP Service. Liz Herbert, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, said that the SAP CRM solution is now displaying the kind of depth SAP is known for. "SAP added a component for managing products that many on-demand CRM vendors don't have. You can use it as the product master or bring in the product master which is typically found in the ERP system," said Herbert. The new service component includes Service Ticket Management, Rule-based Service Ticket Distribution, and Service Level Monitoring. Also included is a rules-base service-level determination calculator that automates the routing of service tickets based on a customer's service level agreement, said Angela Bandlow, vice president at CRM Solutions Marketing. "It's a tiered service that tracks SLAs based on the customer and the required response time," said Bandlow. One of the key differentiators for the SAP offering, according to both Bandlow and Forrester's Herbert, is its ability to integrate easily with MySAP ERP systems on the back end. Using product information found in the ERP system, a sales person can pull up manufacturing availability and pricing information and deliver a quote in real time online. Bandlow said while this completes the three major components of SAP CRM OnDemand, quarterly updates can be expected with the next update due in December. To date, the solution, like almost all on-demand solutions, is not industry-specific. But Bandlow said the company is looking at that and will respond to customer demand.
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CEO says demand for automated support and service drives addition to customer resource management products.
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InfoWorld - Oracle Tuesday announced plans to extend the capability of its system management software to offer monitoring and management for SAP AG applications through a partnership with Nimsoft.
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Compuware this week is upgrading its Vantage application service management software to highlight predictive analysis and performance assessment.
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New SAP upgrades are stretching talent resources, giving job seekers with advanced, up-to-date skills the upper hand in the employment race.
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SAP AG this week unveiled the third version of its CRM On-Demand online suite with enhancements to its service and sales apps.
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Business software supplier SAP is offering customers a new service to ensure the security of their SAP systems, the company said on Wednesday.
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A new add-on for Office Project Server 2003 includes tools for connecting to HR software from SAP.
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The US Postal Service has awarded SAP a $35 million contract to supply a new human-resources system. SAP has benefited from a series of big customer wins this year, showing strong revenue growth
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SAP and Business Objects have announced the first joint products from their merger, although the planned tight integration of the companies&#39; software will take longer to achieve.SAP agreed to pay $6.8 billion for the business intelligence vendor in October. It has now secured more than 87 percent of Business Objects&#39; shares, more than enough to control the company, CEO Henning Kagermann said at a press conference on Wednesday.Business Objects is now a division of SAP led by its former CEO, John Schwarz. The plan is to integrate its analytics technology more tightly with SAP&#39;s business applications, but also to keep selling standalone products that work with other vendors&#39; software.&quot;While we&#39;ll clearly align ourselves to SAP, we are equally committed to non-SAP customers, platforms and environments,&quot; Schwarz said. &quot;Our intention is to have a business intelligence solution on top of Oracle that&#39;s better than Oracle&#39;s own business intelligence solution.&quot;The companies announced nine software packages that will go on sale this month and combine products from Business Objects and SAP. They include Financial Performance Management, Governance, Risk and Compliance, and Visualization and Reporting.The financial package, for example, includes strategy management and planning tools from SAP and financial consolidation and profit management tools from Business Objects, said Doug Merrit, the head of SAP&#39;s Business User division.Those products were already sold separately, and the packages don&#39;t involve any significant integration work. They are intended to give the companies&#39; sales teams something to go out and sell -- although customers should also see a pricing benefit compared with buying the products separately, Schwarz said.The long-term goal is to integrate the companies&#39; software more tightly to form what Kagermann called a &quot;closed loop.&quot; The idea is that SAP users, acting on information from Business Objects&#39; analytics tools, will be able to more quickly adjust underlying business processes running in SAP Netweaver, Kagermann said.SAP will also offer Business Objects&#39; tools as part of its new suite of on-demand business applications for medium-sized enterprises, called Business ByDesign. The team developing Business ByDesign &quot;will be able to pick the best from the Business Objects portfolio and merge it into Business ByDesign,&quot; Kagermann said.Business Objects already offered its products on demand and had 70,000 subscribers at the time of the acquisition, Schwarz said. The job of merging the BI tools into Business ByDesign has not yet started, however, he said.Business ByDesign is still very new. SAP aimed to have about 100 customers live on the system by the end of 2007, a modest target, and its goal for 2008 is &quot;to prove that we can build a profitable volume business,&quot; Kagermann said.SAP&#39;s news coincided with the announcement from its biggest rival,&#160;Oracle, that it reached a deal to buy middleware vendor BEA Systems for $8.5 billion.BEA is in a different business from Business Objects, but Oracle&#39;s move to expand itself further through another big acquisition only helps to validate SAP&#39;s decision to acquire Business Objects. It was the biggest deal in SAP&#39;s history and broke the vendor&#39;s tradition of not acquiring large companies.SAP bought Business Objects for its technology, not its customers, Kagermann said Wednesday, although he sounded pleased about the new customers that SAP will gain.&quot;After you eliminate the joint customers, we&#39;ll have by far the largest installed customer base in the world. There will be probably more than 60,000 customers using one of our products,&quot; he said.Asked about the BEA deal, Kagermann seemed reluctant to be drawn away from discussing SAP&#39;s own merger, but he did take a quick jab at his rival.&quot;So far we are competing very successfully in the market,&quot; he said. &quot;I was a bit surprised [by the BEA acquisition] because Oracle has said they are the leading technology company, and now they are acquiring technology, which is interesting to me.&quot;SAP Deputy CEO Leo Apotheker was more outspoken. &quot;He has to pay more and more for less and less,&quot; he said after the press conference, referring to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. BEA is &quot;not really that big,&quot; he said.Kagermann reiterated that SAP&#39;s strategy is to grow its core businesses -- applications and middleware -- organically, but it won&#39;t rule out another big acquisition to strengthen the company in a new market.
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German business software vendor SAP AG released a new version of its SAP Business One software with several functions designed for small and medium-size manufacturers.
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SAP has launched SAP Security Optimization, a service that evaluates a customer&#39;s SAP system to identify and eliminate potential vulnerabilities and minimize the risk of intrusions.
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Saying customers have been asking for such a tool, IBM and SAP are building an application that would make it easier for customers to bring their SAP data into their Lotus Notes collaboration systems.
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SAP is rolling out a new set of Java and business intelligence enhancements to its NetWeaver middleware and integration stack.
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With the introduction of Real-Time Decision Manager from SAS, the expanding use of predictive analytics synchronized to work with a concurrent business process will receive a major boost.The SAS technology taps into the wealth of analytical data gathered from a company?s databases and scores the company's customers for potential up-sell and cross-sell marketing opportunities.For example, during a transaction -- be it a telephone customer service call or a Web purchase -- Real-Time Decision Manager can direct the customer service representative (CSR) to offer the customer an additional service or product or make an online offer.SAS's global marketing manger Larry Mosiman, believes that Decision Manager will increase wallet share for its customers and help to reduce customer attrition, especially in the highly volatile communications industry.The technology creates a decision diagram that can be based on new information that is captured during the course of a transaction, said Mosiman."Real-Time Decision Manager is all about putting the process flow together to take into account the information gained, even during a conversation that might affect the outcome," said Mosiman.The technology typically comes back with a sub-second response and will handle approximately a thousand transactions per minute.?The concept of decision making in real time is not new. Companies as far back as Compaq were designing similar products; one in particular Compaq called ZLE, for Zero Latency Enterprise.The idea behind real-time decision making, according to Gareth Herschel, a Gartner analyst, has a number of major components.First, it makes intelligent decisions part of the business process."Instead of having somebody going off and doing analysis that is not tied into a business process, this is part of the process," said Herschel.The other key component is that this is not just a way of scoring the customer. Rather, it recommends an action to an agent and may even provide a script for the agent to follow for an up-sell opportunity.There are challenges to the idea, however.Mainly, CSRs are not typically salespeople who are comfortable up-selling a customer. In addition, it flies in the face of how call centers work.Keeping service center costs down is typically based on how quickly a CSR can handle a customer's problem and get them off the phone or off-line. By trying to up-sell or cross-sell a customer, more contact time -- not less -- will be required.Nevertheless, Herschel said although SAS is late to the market with this kind of product, because of its clout in the industry, the idea of? putting decision-making at the point of sale will gain wider acceptance in the enterprise.SAS also announced 1-800-Flowers as its first customer for the product, which is shipping now.
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Board promises 'live demo' action After much talk, and with expectations growing, SAP has pledged a long awaited, "comprehensive update" on its planned A1S on-demand applications suite.â¦