Use SAP C/4HANA to Drive Supply Chain Success

Winning in the experience economy involves delivering personalized customer experience. Learn how SAP C/4HANA can get you there.

In today’s business relationships, customers hold all the power. As you plan your business goals or reevaluate them, put the customer journey and experience at the forefront of your mind to turn your business into an intelligent enterprise.

Why Focus on Customer Experience?

The customer experience is comprised of a complete set of engagements, such as adding products to a shopping cart. It can also involve ecommerce transactions to technology, like chatbots and connected IoT devices. According to annual reports on marketing trends from the past five years, companies rank customer experience (CX) at the top of their priority list.

Why, you may ask?

With long-term plans that highlight the value of a customer-centric approach, organizations are more than twice as likely to significantly outperform their competitors. This approach is not a new and recent idea, but it is one that’s constantly evolving as new trends and technology shape consumer needs.

Most customers are loyal to brands that tailor their experiences to their preferences. This means they’re likely to recommend a brand to their peers. On the flip side, if they’re not satisfied with your company, they will likely look to your competitors for better experiences and warn other to stay away from you. Yikes!

So, if you’re not focused on giving your potential and current customers the best experience possible, it’s time to do so now!

What is SAP C/4HANA?

So, how does SAP C/4HANA fit into the customer-centric approach?

Customers want personalized experiences with your company without feeling like you’re invading their privacy. Therefore, your business needs the technology to help you build stronger relationships, thus driving you to earn and keep your customers’ trust. This is where SAP C/4HANA plays in.

Customer experience needs to connect with the supply chain. SAP C/4HANA is a unified suite of cloud solutions that manages customer experience. The integrated portfolio includes SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, and SAP Customer Data Cloud.

SAP C/4HANA brings together customer and operational data with intelligent technologies across commerce, customer service, marketing, and sales to create engaging and trustworthy experiences to your customers.

Benefits of Using SAP C/4HANA in Supply Chain Logistics

“SAP C/4HANA is all about the consumer. We recognize 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.” -Bill McDermott, former CEO of SAP (2018)

SAP C/4HANA supports the end-to-end customer journey with your company. You would be able to:

• Offer customers transparency and control, while maintaining privacy
• Personalize customer experiences across your business
• Support all go-to-market models
• Save time and guesswork to accelerate sales
• Capture and understand customer feedback
• And much more!

Connecting customer demands to your supply chain is the key to success for your business. SAP C/4HANA lets businesses know what their customers need in real time. Companies that successfully implement a CX strategy can achieve higher customer satisfaction and increase revenues with higher customer loyalty.

Integration with your pre-existing SAP ERP can ensure smoother sales and deliveries. For example, SAP Sales Cloud in C/4HANA can handle complex sales processes and then seamlessly transfer the data to S/4HANA for delivery process management.

Which Route to Take to Implement SAP C/4HANA

Your company’s business needs determine which SAP C/4HANA deployment model is required. Some of the factors in this decision-making process are:

• If the company needs to test new e-commerce solution in specific markets/regions
• If the model aligns with the company’s planned growth forecast
• The extent of the company’s investment in maintaining the support required to efficiently run the model

The cloud solutions in SAP C/4HANA can be deployed standalone or in any combination. The deployment models for SAP C/4HANA offered differ in their availability for customization. The models include:

• On-demand: Easier and faster to deploy with minimal customization
• Hosted: Greater customization options to meet unique business needs
• On-premise: Complete freedom of customizing the solution

SAP C/4HANA will integrate with ECC and S/4HANA and can be deployed standalone without SAP ERP as a back end. Integrating this solution will help ensure smooth logistics and supply chain management required for exceptional customer experience.

The experience economy is growing; it’s time to grow with it.