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by Daniel Beaudry, Product Owner, SAP Retail
Fiori for Retail
When our retail industry development team in Montreal first learned that their next project was to develop a Fiori application (app), they welcomed this as an opportunity to play their part in helping SAP achieve its goal of providing an innovative, simplified and enhanced in-store experience for retail store associates in any type of retail store. Improving customer service is an important, recurring theme in retailers’ minds and is the main driver of SAP Fiori Solutions for In-Store Merchandising.
Our Fiori-based apps allow retail store associates to access real-time data from back-end systems and use this data to provide faster customer service and more accurate product information. It also allows managers to get a more accurate overview of their inventory levels so that they can better manage it. The apps increase productivity by providing store associates with role-based and real-time access to functions, allowing them to look up detailed product information, adjust stock inventory quantities, perform ad hoc inventory counts, and order products for a customer or store.
Development (dev) Angels
As our Fiori apps started to hit the market, we soon discovered opportunities to work more closely with customers. When the first customers to purchase and use our apps have successful pilots and live implementations, they can easily become reference customers, who can spread the good word of their experience to other potential customers. When we learned that a retail chain operating in North America engaged in the sale of specialty pet supplies and services was planning to implement our Look Up Retail Products application, we decided to assign a dev angel within our team to help make sure that the installation would go as smoothly as possible for them.
From a planning perspective, having dev angels on your team is not easy. Every sprint dev angels are given a bucket of hours for their customer assignment but you never really know ahead of time how many hours could be spent on this backlog.
Customer Success Story
Right from the get-go, our dev angel scheduled weekly meetings with the customer –quickly becoming daily discussions. For the customer, having someone they can contact about any blocks that come up and prevent them from moving ahead in their installation, or who can answer any technical or process-related questions makes them feel supported – and let’s just say it makes them feel special! They know they have someone at the other end that will help them provide answers to their question, as well as find the right solutions for them in a timely manner.
Within a few weeks, our specialty pet supplies and services customer was up and running a pilot of our product lookup app, along with other HR apps in five stores with close to 200 employees. The feedback received from store employees range from comments such as: “I like the fact that you can search by UPC, SKU, or product description. Searching by description is a nice touch for seeing similar items” to “I like that it lists nearby stores and their on-hand quantity for the item you are searching for.”
Such comments showcase that we are indeed providing easy and simple features to the right people, which is what the SAP Fiori is all about. Our team strives to achieve this goal so that we, in turn, can make our customers successful. We want to make sure that when our customer is ready for the full implementation, their thousands of store associates think that our apps are easy, simple and provide the right functions they need to better serve their customers. And trust us, with SAP Fiori Solutions for In-Store Retail Merchandising, they will!
More information on FIORI Solutions for In-Store Merchandising can be found here.
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