SAP inspires companies to focus on Customer Experience with the new C/4HANA

Mark Peeters, 15 June 2018

Last week we visited the yearly SAPPHIRE NOW conference in Orlando, Florida to catch up with SAP’s plans for the future. And I must say these plans look really promising. With this blog I will guide you through some key takeaways.
With the positioning of the new SAP C/4HANA suite SAP will focus fully on Customer Experience, Trust and The Intelligent Enterprise. Bill McDermott, SAP CEO, stated:

“The legacy CRM systems are all about sales; SAP C/4HANA is all about the consumer. We recognise that every part of a business needs to be focused on a single view of the consumer. When you connect all SAP applications together in an intelligent cloud suite, the demand chain directly fuels the behaviors of the supply chain.”

Customer Experience

With the new suite SAP C/4HANA will deliver a unified UI and customer experience across the products of this suite. The “C” is for customer and “4” stands for fourth-generation CRM. The suite runs on the digital core, SAP S/4HANA. Follow this formula and, voilà, you have SAP C/4HANA.

Within this unified suite, SAP has simplified the former SAP Hybris product offerings together with acquired solutions, into:

SAP Sales Cloud: Unites former SAP Hybris Cloud for Customers with SAP Revenue Cloud, the on-premise SAP Hybris Billing solution, and the acquired Callidus Cloud solutions
SAP Commerce Cloud: Evolved from Hybris Commerce flagship offering to its recent launch on Microsoft Azure
SAP Marketing Cloud: Now integrates to SAP Commerce Cloud and is open to partnerships
SAP Service Cloud: Enables both field service and next generation, multi-channel customer engagement and support
SAP Customer Data Cloud: Incorporates the acquired Gigya solutions, which include consent, profile, and identity feature

If you look from a process point of view SAP C/4HANA will drive the demand chain where SAP S/4HAHA will drive the Supply Chain of organisations.

Trust

SAP realizes that customer loyalty comes with trust. Gaining a customers trust requires organizations to be transparent in the use of customer data. SAP Customer Data Cloud helps organizations increase customer retention and boost brand loyalty by providing a transparent, flexible and secure digital experience. SAP Customer Data Cloud helps to address regional consumer privacy laws, including GDPR, by centrally capturing, managing and synchronizing preferences and consent in accordance to regulations across the digital SAP technology stack throughout the customer lifecycle.

Intelligent Enterprise

Hasso Plattner, one of the founders of SAP, spoke about the future of customer interaction and the role of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). More and more solutions will be delivered by SAP to integrate machine learning in customer facing processes. The addition of A.I. will drive the Intelligent Enterprise. With SAP Leonardo, SAP offers a set of services like Machine Learning, IoT and Blockchain.

With all these new products and plans SAP aims to take over the CRM market and inspire its customers to join on the journey to become an Intelligent Enterprise. We at Acorel are very excited to join our customers on this journey and to support them on this adventure.