Marketing, Sales and Service for SMBs
At first glance SAP Anywhere might appear to be just another new eCommerce solution for online retailers. But if you dig a little deeper you find much more. Purpose built for the small to medium size business (SMB) with a digital presence, it is a complete front office solution. It is a multi-channel commerce and marketing platform designed to be mobile first, low-touch and easily extensible. It supports SMBs in their efforts to:
Design and manage marketing programs and leads
Manage inside sales and customer service
Have visibility into what’s being sold, through which channel
Process online and in-store orders in one place
Track and manage inventory
Yes, SAP Anywhere targets retailers, but also recognizes the evolution in the way products are bought and sold today. Not only do retailers sell through multiple channels (online, in store and anything in between), but also more and more manufacturers and distributors have at least one sales channel where they eliminate the middleman and sell directly to the consumer. This places new demands on the business at the point of sale, demands typically not easily addressed by back office solutions such as enterprise resource planning (ERP).
SAP has taken a modular approach to satisfying these needs. Rather than building more complexity into the ERP solution itself, forcing upgrades or replacement, it loosely couples the front office to existing back office solutions. If you are an SAP Business One or SAP Business By Design customer, the integration is out of the box. But the platform approach of SAP Anywhere also allows it to be easily connected to any back office – virtually anywhere.
Supporting Any Model, Anywhere
When it comes to managing the sale of goods, retail and manufacturing/ distribution are typically worlds apart. In retail, at the point of sale you deal with cash, check or debit/credit card; the customer walks away with goods in hand and inventory is depleted. In manufacturing you process your customer’s purchase order, create a sales order and subsequently ship and invoice, relieving inventory and creating accounts receivable. Later you receive cash and apply the cash receipt against accounts receivable either on an open item or a cash balance basis.
Receiving cash in a traditional point of sale system in a retail environment, either in store or online is easy. Managing an open account is more difficult. For a manufacturer or distributor using an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, managing accounts and accounts receivable is standard practice. Processing a cash sale is more difficult.
In a retail store, the cash in the drawer is reconciled against the sales recorded at the end of the day. In a manufacturing or distribution environment shipments, invoices and cash receipts are reconciled at the end of the month. Yet in all cases, everything must be posted to the general ledger in order to create a balance sheet and profit and loss statement.
So what happens when a manufacturer or distributor sells directly to a consumer? It happens more and more today in showrooms and factory outlets, as well as online. In eliminating the traditional retailer, does the manufacturer need to invest in a retail point of sale (POS) solution, an eCommerce solution, as well as a back office ERP solution… and then interface or integrate them all in the hope they will one day all work seamlessly?
SAP Anywhere supports all these different environments at the point of sale without causing you to jump through hoops, automatically sending the necessary transactions back to ERP, whether you post an order, to be followed by shipment, invoice and payment or whether it all happens at once. And with SAP Anywhere, it’s not just about being able to take cash for a product in hand. Manufacturers or distributors might have a virtual showroom from which you can place a more traditional business-to-business (B2B) order. The manufacturer or distributor might have the goods in stock to be shipped and invoiced, or it might take an order, source the product and have it shipped directly to the customer. SAP Anywhere supports any and all of these different business models.
And these business models, and even prices, may vary by channel. Are you selling direct, through distributors or through online commerce companies like Amazon or Alibaba? Today are they all forced to use the same catalog and pricing? Or are you forced to create (maintain) separate catalogs for each? Can you tie a channel to a specific warehouse or fulfill all orders from a central distribution point or anything in between? If using a central warehouse, can you reserve inventory for a specific channel? All of these options are supported by SAP Anywhere. Perhaps SAP should call it SAP Anywhere Anyhow.
Flexibility in Payment
SAP Anywhere can also accept a variety of payment methods common in a combination of online and physical retail outlets including in store, showroom, warehouse or simply “in person” transactions (think about a service technician selling a spare part). These payment methods include cash, debit card and stripe (payments infrastructure).
In a physical setting, the application itself supports bar code scanning directly from the mobile device on which the sale is captured, without any added hardware. Or you can add an external scanner connected via Bluetooth. In addition to the scanner you might also connect a printer and make use of cash drawer functions that allow the use of any personal computer with a “locked” cash drawer, all while keeping track of total sales for any day broken out by payment method.
Customer Lead Generation
Completing a sale is great, but not necessarily unique to SAP. However, there is more to the front office function than just selling. The front office is also tasked with creating demand and acquiring new customers. These marketing functions are typically supported by separate applications, if at all. Many SMBs today see digital marketing as an affordable alternative to more traditional software to manage marketing campaigns. But they then struggle to tie these digital campaigns back to the transactions for closed loop marketing.
The next area of investment in developing SAP Anywhere is in the realm of digital marketing. Look for instant integration with Constant Contact and Mail Chimp, both of which can track clicks and other campaign statistics. Next on the docket are search (think Google ads) and integration with social media to integrate campaigns into Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Where and When?
SAP Anywhere isn’t available everywhere… yet. It launched in Beijing in October, in partnership with China Telecom. SAP is planning to launch in the United Kingdom soon, to be followed shortly thereafter in North America. But it will need to continue to expand geographically if it wants to achieve its goal of 100,000 customers within five years. Along with that customer count goal comes an annual revenue goal of $200 million. Because this solution is completely cloud-based, all sales will be by subscription.
If you do the math, this means average annual revenue per customer of just $2,000, making it quite affordable and appealing to the SMB market.
In Summary…
SAP seems to have very aggressive plans for SAP Anywhere, targeting growing SMBs interested in having more customers. And today, who isn’t? The Internet levels the playing field for expansion and growth. But growing your customer base today also requires a digital presence – one that is very carefully orchestrated from lead generation to customer acquisition to customer retention. Don’t settle for just one piece of the puzzle. Make sure you start down a path that can take you Anywhere you want to go. Perhaps SAP Anywhere can help.