SAP sets improbable goals for ERP service
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Analysts say that SAP is setting unrealistic sales goals for its long-anticipated hosted ERP system, which will be available next year.
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(InfoWorld) - Business software vendor SAP has added an offering to its growing suite of quickly deployable applications aimed at helping businesses manage specific tasks across diverse industries. SAP xApp Sales and Operations Planning (SAP xSOP), to be available in March, will enable finance, sales, purchasing, and production departments to collect, analyze, and track all sales and operations-planning data in a central location, thus cutting the time office staff spends compiling and preparing information for directors to make decisions, SAP said Wednesday. The application, the newest member in the SAP xApp family of composite applications, will help companies deal with a common challenge in their sales operations: obtaining a consolidated view of all the sales planning-related data that flows through spreadsheets and applications used by numerous departments, according to Andrew White, research vice president at Gartner. SAP's composite applications, which run on the company's NetWeaver integration middleware, tap reusable functions, or "services," from existing IT systems, automating processes that improve collaboration among business units and business partners, according to SAP With SAP xSOP, each user sees the same sales and operations planning data at the level of detail they need via role-based dashboards, according to SAP. For instance, a detergent maker's sales and marketing directors can use their dashboards to determine the regional campaigns and in-store promotions needed to achieve a monthly million-unit projection. Production managers can use the same projection to determine how much detergent will be powdered, how much will be liquid, and how many tablets to plan for. Integrated key performance indicators will be available in general categories such as demand, supply, inventory, capacity and budget. The indicators can be easily added and altered.
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An SAP initiative to more tightly align its business software with Microsoft's tools is about to bear fruit.
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Tenants up the wazoo Dreamforce Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's chief executive, today poured scorn on SAP for its temerity in planning on-demand business applications. At no time did he mention the company by name, but everyone recognised his target when he referred to software firms using dated architectures and hoodwinking customers.â¦
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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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SAP aims to have 1,000 customers for its hosted midmarket ERP service, Business ByDesign, before the end of the year. It plans to roll out the service in 20 more countries, including India, in that time.&quot;We will go after the biggest markets first,&quot; said deputy CEO Leo Apotheker. &quot;India is a very important market for a product like&#160;Business ByDesign,&quot; he said.The subscription-based ERP (enterprise resource planning) service launched in September, and is now available in the U.S., France, Germany, the U.K., and China.SAP will launch the service in new countries each quarter. The Indian launch will happen in the second quarter, according to an SAP spokesman.&quot;For the year, we would like to reach 1,000 customers,&quot; said Apotheker. &quot;That&#39;s enough to show we are a true player in this business.&quot;Apotheker declined to say how many seats the 1,000-customer target represents, noting only that Business ByDesign is aimed at customers with between 100 and 700 employees. Business ByDesign costs $149 per user per month in the U.S., with a minimum of 25 users.Business ByDesign is not the only SAP product for small and mid-size companies: there are also Business All-in-One or, for companies with fewer than 100 employees, Business One. Both run on the customer&#39;s own servers.In some regions, the notion of an ERP &quot;service&quot; can be a hard sell for cultural reasons. &quot;China is a market where the pure on-demand model is still viewed with conservatism,&quot; Apotheker said.&quot;Many people have been worried about the potential for cannibalism, but that isn&#39;t happening,&quot; said Apotheker.&quot;Business All in One is very strong, and Business One had a very good year. We grew the number of customers significantly. There are no issues with cannibalization.&quot;With that confidence that it won&#39;t eat its own market share, SAP plans to offer Business ByDesign to smaller subsidiaries of existing Business ByDesign customers, Apotheker said.
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SAP AG this week unveiled a service that evaluates security settings across a customer&#39;s SAP enterprise system. SAP Security Optimization helps customers identify and fix vulnerabilities, and minimise the
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Swiss-cheese time for A1S SAP has crashed Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce conference with its own event, trumpeting its long-awaited ondemand business applications challenger.â¦
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A new survey by IAG Consulting finds that among two-thirds of companies polled, it is &quot;improbable&quot; that an IT project will be considered an overall success due to inadequately or improperly gathered business requirements.
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Vendors of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software can expect their market to become more buoyant as companies ponder purchasing new systems or boosting the functionality of existing ones, according to ...
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Service Oriented Architecture isn't getting any easier despite the raft of acquisitions.
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SAP has unwrapped a new on-demand business software platform targeted at midsize companies (100 to 500 employees) looking to simplify their I.T. requirements while improving the efficiency and flexibility of their business processes.
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SAP America Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are collaborating on a hosted enterprise resource planning software service for midsize companies in specific vertical markets.
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I got an interesting teaser in the e-mail this week: âStudy Suggests Nearly Half of All Leaders See a Disconnect Between Strategy and Execution.â I wonât say who sent it because they blew the execution: The so-called study wasnât posted anywhere online, and when I called the number, theyâd already left for the weekend.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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SAP plans to expand its focus on business intelligence (BI) software over the next year.
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Thinks modular for NetWeaver There'll be no more big updates for SAP's ERP software until 2010, as SAP entices customers and developers to adopt new products and initiatives for its NetWeaver SOA strategy.â¦
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Delivering on a promise made earlier this year, SAP has unveiled the first set of products to help businesses meet their compliance requirements, in addition to announcing a marketing agreement with Cisco Systems.