Customer Journey is a 7-by-24-hour task

Stefan Oltmanns (see Round Table) and his colleagues Marcus Banner and Cengiz Varol answer the most important trends in e-commerce in a compact form.

"A key challenge for companies is the rapid pace at which the market is changing in terms of customer-centric digital requirements and the resulting pressure to adapt"

Stefan Oltmanns defines at the beginning.

The demands of end customers require companies to respond quickly and develop digital solutions (at touchpoints ...) for a "perfect" and "individual" shopping experience.

In addition, companies need to intelligently link and evaluate ever-increasing mass data in order to maintain their competitive edge (e.g., to offer more optimized product ranges, make more individualized offers to customers, etc.).

Only these two challenges can no longer be solved directly from the stable ERP core. Often, parallel IT system landscapes have emerged/are emerging that are supposed to solve the digital requirements and profitably link the masses of data.

Challenge: How does retail manage to integrate the ever-increasing variety of available personalized and non-personalized customer touchpoint solutions with back-end systems/processes in ever-shorter cycles?

The so-called customer experience applications usually cannot be optimally integrated with the ERP systems in the back end. This leads

• to very complex interface topics, which are hardly maintainable and always have to be adapted individually
• to masses of data that are sent back and forth between systems and are usually kept redundant
• to data inconsistencies between the systems
• to non-integrated supply chain processes

Stefan Oltmanns comments:

"To address these challenges, SAP has spent the past few years creating an application architecture that enables a retailer to meet the speed required for ever-changing solutions at touchpoints from a stable ERP core, and provides the foundation to implement omnichannel services flexibly and efficiently."

In addition, this new overall architecture offers retailers the option of not only analyzing and using their own data, but also enriching it with third-party data (e.g., social media data) or connecting third-party systems.

The modern architecture thus enables retailers to not only deal with the ERP core, but also to further implement the required e-commerce requirements and Big Data requirements.

Marcus Banner describes SAP as follows:

"SAP not only has the systemic and process omnichannel architecture as a solution portfolio, but also the technological platform, for example with the 'microservice-oriented architecture'."

This architecture allows decoupling between, for example, SAP cloud or multi-cloud architectures and ERP back-end systems, which makes it possible to further develop the process and system landscape at two speeds. Process integration takes place via the SAP CPI and data integration via the DATA HUB.

Larger customer-specific applications that have a significant influence on the standard can be developed separately from the ERP system (SAP Extension Factory, where modern technologies such as Kubernetes can be used). This means that IT operations will also be possible at two speeds in the future.

Complementary Marcus Banner explains:

"Technological approach: the retailer can develop and deploy customer services (as microservices or use cases) for its customers more quickly and flexibly in such a decoupled architecture."

Combinations of SAP and non-SAP microservices (solutions) are also possible. These can also be integrated within SAP SCP with message broker technologies.

The retailer does not have to program everything from scratch or integrate it with his ERP. They just need to know how to integrate the applications via cloud technologies.

Cengiz Varol emphasizes the consistent roadmap:

"Once it is understood that market requirements can be further implemented via this technological architecture, the crucial question is.

As a retailer, how do I handle the migration to the new SAP process and omnichannel architecture? Processual approach: From our point of view, it is necessary to take a holistic view of the strategy and the requirements in the company in the process and to cast the results in a strategic plan for the future - roadmap!"

Originally "classic" retail processes can be found as a function in SAP CAR or in the consuming apps in the new architecture components (promotion creation/planning, multi-quantity planning or /-forcast, central pricing, allocation tables, online stocks, online order reservations ...).

Marketing systems and their processes must be viewed integratively (data linkage, segmentation, customer journey, strategic marketing planning, personalization, etc.).

Stefan Oltmanns concludes: "The customer wants a consistent shopping experience, regardless of the channel. This means that the back-end and supply chain processes in retail must be the same or very closely interlinked."

Only in this way is efficient work possible for a dealer and additional work per channel avoidable. We can thus see that it is not a detached topic, but that this requires planning across all SAP and non-SAP architecture components; up to the consideration of a SAP S/4HANA migration/conversion and the path (e.g. only technical? with pre-project? Greenfield? Brownfield?).
Stefan Oltmanns:

"As RealCore, we have had these discussions with many customers over the past 18 months, and have arrived at architecture goal statements with some customers using our process model, which are now being implemented.

It is no longer just a matter of launching individual projects (isolated field trials often fail), but of clearly evaluating the SAP Retail Reference Architecture (and its components) on a customer-specific basis, integrating SAP and non-SAP applications, determining business added value and priorities, in order to align and decide on the basis of this what can be implemented in which sensible steps, in order to ultimately introduce the new SAP architecture with its components in a process-oriented manner and thus be able to respond to the rapid pace of the market and the customers in a future-proof manner - and this with very few restrictions if possible."

Company profile

The RealCore Group is a group of companies focusing on process and technology consulting in retail.

In line with the motto "Where Technology meets Business", RealCore projects the SAP modules of the digital core of the latest SAP solution including the components of the new SAP CAR omnichannel architecture for all retail sales channels.

We use state-of-the-art technologies such as SAP S/4HANA, PI/PO/CPI, SCP or UI5 for innovative solutions that benefit our customers.