Leading Consumer Products Companies Leverage New Version of mySAP™ CRM to Efficiently Manage Key Industry Processes and Increase Profitability
WALLDORF, Germany — SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that it has delivered a robust new suite of solutions to manage the unique end-to-end business processes for consumer products companies with the latest version of mySAP™ Customer Relationship Management (mySAP CRM). Consumer products leaders such as Colgate-Palmolive, the Dial Corporation, Fraser & Neave Holdings Bhd and Nestlé are choosing the comprehensive functionality of mySAP CRM to streamline key marketing, sales and service, and supply chain processes; increase revenue through better understanding of customers; and improve targeting and execution of marketing campaigns and trade promotions. The latest version of mySAP CRM, available now, provides a comprehensive offering of industry-specific solutions that impact the highest-priority business processes for organizations in 23 industries.
Consumer products companies face unique business challenges, such as diminishing brand loyalty, quickly outdated product lines, complex trade promotion processes and the need to operate individual product categories as separate strategic business units. These challenges are magnified by the need to maintain close relationships with two very different sets of customers: retailers and consumers.
As the leading provider of enterprise solutions to the consumer products industry, SAP helps consumer products companies meet these unique business challenges. The new release of mySAP CRM addresses the business processes that directly impact revenue and helps consumer products companies increase competitive advantage. Tailored capabilities for the consumer products industry such as SAP® Trade Promotion Management, brand management, category management and account management help companies effectively launch and monitor trade promotions, efficiently use marketing assets to achieve faster time to market and gain crucial insight into consumers’ perceptions of their own and competitors’ products.
“SAP offers a fully integrated CRM solution for consumer products companies—from analytics to brand and account management, effective consumer programs and profitable promotions,” said Nils Herzberg, senior vice president of industry business unit Manufacturing & Distribution, SAP AG. “We understand our consumer products customers’ challenges and address these with tailored functionality to fulfill companies’ mission-critical business objectives for enhanced efficiency, improved profitability and swift ROI.”
Industry’s Most Comprehensive Trade Promotion Management Capability
Aimed at effectively promoting products to end consumers and improving sales efforts at retail outlets, the processes of planning, executing and analyzing trade promotions directly impact departments throughout the enterprise. Leveraging SAP’s order fulfillment, supply chain management, strategic enterprise management and business intelligence solutions, mySAP CRM ties together a seamless, end-to-end trade promotion management process that extends its value across the entire enterprise and to business partners, ensuring maximum value from the significant investment—an average of 17 percent of revenue—that consumer products companies spend yearly on trade-promotion efforts.
SAP Trade Promotion Management helps companies manage crucial trade promotion processes in a closed-loop, integrated approach to improve management of promotional spending, effectively plan promotions with each retail customer and make forecast volume for promotions that can be analyzed on key performance indicators such as total trade expenditures, profit impact and incremental return on investment.
Fraser & Neave Holdings Bhd (F&N), a leading carbonated and isotonic drinks producer based in Kuala Lumpur, recently announced its plans to roll out the mySAP™ Business Suite family of business solutions to help solidify its top market position in Malaysia and to become the leading beverage company in the region. The company selected SAP Trade Promotion Management to improve retail partner collaboration and generate bottom-line savings.
“Our success relies on close collaboration with retailers, insight into the market and increased brand loyalty among consumers,” said Tan Ang Meng, chief executive officer, F&N Group. “mySAP Business Suite solutions will be key enablers in our drive for the top position in the region. SAP Trade Promotion Management will help us keep track of perception and performance of our products in the market, derive better results from promotional activities and dramatically reduce inventory levels to improve our cash flow.”
Powering Profitability with Category, Brand and Account Management
In the area of category management, now standard practice at nearly every retailer, collaboration is the key to maximum efficiency. Consumer products companies must collaborate with retailers to optimize product stock, shelf placement, product positioning, suggested retail pricing and promotional activities. Category management capabilities from SAP support true collaboration among trading partners, leveraging SAP’s strength in predictive analytics to enable companies to evaluate their own and competitors’ products, better understand consumer behavior and help achieve preferred-vendor status with their retail customers. By employing third-party data to analyze the performance of a product category—comparing pricing, placement, and promotion of individual products—category management helps consumer products companies increase consumer loyalty and enhance product profitability and market share.
mySAP CRM provides brand managers with many of the best tools in the industry to plan and monitor all the media, consumer and trade activities to support their brands, drive market share profitability and increase brand awareness. Brand management functionality in mySAP CRM gives managers a 360-degree view into all the activities, by territory, for each product line—including trade promotions, sales events and new product launches—to determine how well each product is performing against the competition and contributing to the overall profitability of the brand.
By allowing account managers to oversee all of their daily activities and planning processes in a closed-loop, fully integrated solution, mySAP CRM helps reduce process cycle times, delivering increased savings for manufacturers. In addition, by aggregating reporting across all regions and locations, individual logistics, accounting, finance and senior management users have greater access to the most relevant customer information—enabling consumer products companies to more easily identify the opportunities and challenges presented by each customer.
SAP for Consumer Products
mySAP CRM is also available as part of SAP for Consumer Products, an industry-specific portfolio offering consumer products companies additional mySAP Business Suite solutions. As a trusted and innovative advisor in the consumer products industry, SAP’s customers in the sector include the top 10 beverage and consumer electronics companies, nine out of the top 10 health and personal care companies, eight out of the top 10 food companies and seven out of the top 10 apparel and footwear companies. SAP has more than 2,400 customers in the consumer products industry.
