Highlights customer momentum across categories for SAP solutions; Signs on Subhiksha Retail as 1,000th SME customer in India; Reaffirms commitment to localizing solutions for Indian business environments
Mumbai — At the opening day of SAP Summit ’07, SAP India’s three-day annual business and technology forum that is estimated to bring together over 2,000 attendees including customers, partners, industry experts, media and analysts, the company highlighted “responsiveness to change” as critical to the continued growth and success of Indian businesses. In an era of increased competition and commoditization, SAP underscored the need for businesses to fuel profitable growth by relying upon accelerated business innovation and the productivity of non-differentiating tasks help accelerate business innovation. In addition, SAP also released new data showing continued customer wins across categories in India, including the signing on of its 1,000th SME customer in the country – Subhiksha Retail.
Speaking on SAP’s strong and continued partnership with Indian businesses, Alan Sedghi, President & CEO, Indian Subcontinent said, “Opportunities for Indian businesses today are boundless – both globally and domestically. The incredible pace of customer adoption for us in India is a testament to the evolution of SAP solutions into the trusted industry and business platform for growth. SAP will continue to provide customers in India with an enhanced portfolio of solutions, proven industry best practices, and the tools to adopt new innovations easily and seamlessly over time.”
On SAP’s impressive adoption among SMEs, he said, “Indian SMEs are growing at impressive rates year after year. They need solutions that have fast time-to-value, quick and easy user adoption, high flexibility and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). We are happy to announce that over 1000 Small and Midsize companies in India have adopted SAP solutions for our strengths in these areas.”
SAP achieves record breaking new customer wins till date in 2007
SAP achieved a record breaking number of new wins in 2007 with almost 400 Indian enterprises choosing SAP as their preferred business software solution, translating to the addition of more than two new customers per work day in 2007. This year SAP India further consolidated its market leadership across significant verticals like Banking, Financial Services and Insurance, Higher Education and Research, Pharmaceuticals, Retail, Engineering & Constructions, Home-building, Auto-component Manufacturing, Metals and Mining, IT services, Media, Mill Products among others.
SAP India witnessed this unprecedented momentum of new-wins across the entire span of the country in all regions and across all segments – Large Enterprises, Small & Midsize Enterprises and Very Small Enterprises in India. Today, SAP solutions empower over 1,800 Indian enterprises from across these segments. Some recent customer wins for SAP include MRF Tyres, GMR Group, SAIL, M N Dastur, Century Plyboards, Ceat Limited, University of Mumbai, Radio City, Provogue, Jaypee Group, Gulf Oil, ABB, Binani Cement, Tide Water Oil, ARTEMIS Healthcare, Birakia Holdings, M&B Footwear, Paradeep Phosphates amongst others.
Reaffirmation of SAP’s market leadership is the Dataquest Customer Satisfaction Audit 2007, comprising verticals like manufacturing, government, banking, financial services and insurance, IT/ITES and education sector conducted across ten cities in India that revealed that Indian CIOs rate SAP as the leader on key parameters like product reliability, responsiveness to specific client requirements, domain knowledge of customers business and post-sales support.
1,000 Indian SME customers reaffirm SAP’s success as the vendor of choice for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs)
SAP has achieved a significant milestone of signing on Subhiksha, India’s largest and fast growing retail chain, as its 1000th SME customer in the country. Indian SMEs looking to growth and increase in efficiency by automating their enterprise operations have constantly relied on SAP solutions for their robustness, scalability and flexibility. This was reaffirmed by the Frost & Sullivan Market Leadership Award for Mid-Market ERP conferred upon SAP in 2006.
Subhiksha chose to implement the SAP® All-in-One solution to increase efficiency of its business processes and help the chain’s ambitious plans of increasing its presence from the present 750 stores to 1500 stores across the country over the next 12 months.
Speaking on Subhiksha’s decision to implement SAP, R Subramanian, Director of Subhiksha said, “At Subhiksha we provide our customers with the best prices, and ensuring that we have the right merchandise in the right quantity means that we need to have an IT backbone that enables us to exercise greater control over the process and also provide full visibility of information across the business for efficient decision making. SAP was a perfect fit as we found SAP Best Practices for Retail a fully integrated and scalable solution set which enables us to get visibility of all data whenever wherever and also enables us to control the activities across a chain which is now truly pan India and set processes geared to local needs . We chose SAP for its robust retail practices, globally proven solutions, strong integration capabilities, scalability and rich retail specific features – especially the flexibility of integrating with our other applications. SAP will integrate our operations across 750+ stores and we will look forward to working closely with SAP in scaling our operations to 1,500 stores by 2008.”
SAP continues to deliver localized solutions suited to Indian business environment
Continuing its commitment to localize enterprise solutions to suit Indian business requirements, SAP India today announced that it has delivered vertical and solution specific functionalities that would enable its customers to adhere to the local key business process and legal requirements. Indian localizations have been an integral part of SAP India solutions and the initial releases have been around Logistics, Financials and Human Capital Management.
Enhancing the localization span to other solutions from SAP, SAP India has announced the availability of localizations in significant verticals like Public Services and Utilities and across important and niche operations like Real Estate Management, Treasury Risk Management, Supplier Relationship Management.
Some of the India specific functionalities that have been released for SAP for Utilities include features like ECS Mandate, Late Payment Charges, Prompt Payment Incentive and Security Deposit Enhancements amongst others. The SAP For Public Services has very niche localizations like Roster Management for Reservation Candidates, Employee Self Services for Reimbursements (Claims), Loans, Leave Encashment, Increment Processing etc. Similarly localization features for Real Estate Management includes India specific requirements like TDS computation and deduction for lease in process etc.
A vibrant and growing partner ecosystem
Leveraging the vast pool of Indian IT services companies, SAP has built a unique and vast ecosystem of over 160 partners thereby ensuring a high degree of customer satisfaction. These partners have significantly enhanced their SAP practices over the years and have been recognized in the global SAP ecosystem.
Today, the SAP partner ecosystem in India include 20 service partners, 22 SAP All-in-One partners, over 75 ISV partners, 3 SAP Business One distributors, 80 SAP Business One resellers.
