Placing the Customer at the heart of it: CAR

Placing the customer at the heart of it, a 360 view, customer centricity, etc. The list of clichés are endless but I wanted to share with you a relatively recent innovation from SAP; Customer Activity Repository (CAR). This also makes the claim of customer orientation but having been acquainted to it, I think there is merit to its claims and in particular, retailers could leverage tremendous value from its capabilities.

If you are a retailer that has a multi-channel presence, relatively large transactional throughput and currently use SAP Applications, this is certainly one for you.

One of the common challenges experienced by retailers tends to be the isolated view of their sales channels and the inability to view customer sales across the multiple channels that they operate within. CAR has been designed to address this along with unleashing a raft of capability which will substantially improve the effectiveness of retail execution. The solution principally caters for Sales and Inventory data and both are loaded from SAP Retail on a real time basis. CAR is a series of data models and Virtual Data Models (VDM) that can be deployed to SAP HANA. More on the technical elements shortly. Once deployed and configured, the business has access to a series of engaging and valuable outputs. This includes a Dashboard providing access to all pertinent metrics along with a range of SAP BusinessObjects content purposely designed to provide engaging sales and stock information to aid retailers. As an example this includes real time alerts based on Shelf Availability; this is based on advanced algorithms which can track sales frequency along with inventory volumes and alert users of lines that may be in stock but not on the shelf. Similarly, Demand Forecasting is calculated through leveraging the HANA predictive engines and based on the sales and inventory data it is able to harvest.

If any of you are familiar with the RDS for Shopper Insight, think of this as the evolved and much-embellished version of that. It consumes POS data but also, eradicates the dependency on NetWeaver BW and is capable of running POSDM as part of the CAR framework.

Technically, this is a native SAP HANA application which can be deployed in a number of scenarios: on-premise, side-car, integrated and with Suite on HANA and finally Cloud. I think that covers everything but please get in touch if you are not represented by any of these install choice and we can discuss further.

In summary, an exciting solution which ships as an RDS and can be instantly deployed to deliver tremendous value to a retailer in a very short deployment time scale. It’s underpinning by SAP HANA ensures optimal performance and flexibility when it comes to enhancing the content to meet your specific requirements.

Find out more about SAP HANA here.