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Q2 2024 has been a whirlwind of activity! We've made substantial advancements to our product with updates such as robust AI capabilities, scalable sandboxes and the introduction of Consumption Credits, all aimed at increased flexibility for your commerce operations.
We took center stage at our annual SAP Sapphire event, proudly showcasing how SAP is leading the way in Business AI. We shined a spotlight on how esteemed customers like Nestlé are leveraging SAP's offerings to provide seamless experiences, coupled with the latest updates on our Intelligent CX portfolio and roadmap. You can discover the many CX highlights by watching the on-demand replays.
As we wind down the first half of the year, we'd like to give you an early heads-up about our 2024 Holiday Season Readiness Program in preparation for the year-end holidays. You must register by August 30, 2024 to participate in this free program.
SAP recently earned the TrustRadius Top Rated and G2 awards for commerce which are a testament to our unwavering commitment to our customers and the trust and value our customers have experienced with SAP Commerce Cloud. We also listen to customer feedback. As an example, the self-service pod restart feature highlighted in this blog was a top requested feature in our SAP Customer Influencer tool.
Let's now dive into the top features that have been rolled out in the past three months for SAP Commerce Cloud. To see our product in action, please view the Q2 2024 Release Highlights webcast to learn more about our latest innovations.
Industry-Tailored
Leverage AI to streamline sales of complex products
Let's talk about SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation (SAP IPR), our advanced, cloud-native Business AI tool specially designed for manufacturers and distributors dealing with complex products.
SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation is like the ultimate smart friend we all wish we had. It uses historical data, paired with machine learning, to suggest the most suitable standard or customizable products. But it doesn’t stop there. It can also offer recommendations on areas like default configuration options, price estimates, delivery timeline, total cost of ownership, and even factors like weight - all tailored around the customer’s initially stated needs.
Let’s take a distributor example. The distributor needs to update some of the vehicles in their fleet and desires fuel efficiency and the means to keep products refrigerated in the cab. Now with SAP IPR, instead of configuring technical options, the distributor can specify needs and preferences and receive recommendations of options such as engine types, engine power, cab sizes, cooling systems, and more.
We also provide an intuitive NoCode app builder. This easy-to-use tool empowers business users to create need-based recommendation models that blend human intelligence with machine intelligence. What’s in it for you? Here comes the fun part:
- You get consistent B2B product and configuration recommendations that align to your customers’ functional and business needs.
- You can drastically cut down on time, effort, and the need for technical know-how to generate a quote or shopping cart.
- You offer a genuine self-service e-commerce experience to your customers, reducing the need for sales rep assistance.
- You witness faster revenue generation by getting your new hires sale-ready sooner, matching the efficiency and effectiveness of veteran sales reps, and accelerating your expansion into new markets.
New enhancements to SAP Recommerce for your circular commerce business and sustainability strategy
In the Q1 2024 webcast, we took a deep-dive into SAP Recommerce. Since then, we’ve enhanced the overall ease of use and data visibility for both admin and workbench/business users.
For Admins:
- You now have richer control over configurable product attributes. You can upload up to 15 customer-specific product attributes into SAP Recommerce alongside the default product data to cater to unique customer needs.
- Here’s to greater visibility and transparency -- Admins and customers alike can now easily access sustainability data. Admins can import and view sustainability data for each SKU and search for specific products or metrics. Customers can view the imported sustainability data for each item they propose for trade-in via the shopping application.
For Workbench/Business Users:
- Got a new item for check-in? Users can now manually enter or scan a new barcode to tag that item appropriately. Each item is given a distinct barcode or a digital ID (think: digital passport or serialization) for precise identification.
- Dig into the details with this new feature—users can view a full list of all traded-in items and can search for specific items using the item’s barcode or unique ID value.
- Users can effectively capture the default and actual time and cost a particular condition indicator takes to rectify, be it cleaning, repairing or reshaping.
- Curate your custom workflows -- SAP Recommerce will draft out the steps needed for processing products from "Check In" to "Ready to Restock" based on condition severity, repair requirements, and possible programs (e.g., cleaning only, repair and clean, repair only). Users can select condition indicators that best reflect the evaluation of the product and choose the relevant process flow for the item—say, clean & repair. The subsequent steps get generated automatically and users can process the item until restock.
The overall benefits with these new enhancements are:
- Increased product usability across different lines of business and industry solutions
- Improved usability and management of trade-in products through intuitive business tools, search, product attribute data display, and flexible process flows
- Clear visibility of sustainability data and impact for both business users and customers
Create custom workflows in SAP Recommerce
Telco Accelerator - Empower customers to gain a more thorough understanding of their subscribed service with both fixed and personalized selections
We’ve improved the Telco Accelerator to help you transform faster with this industry-specific capability. Customers will have a more comprehensive understanding of their subscription services, for both fixed and personalized selections. Customers can also easily track modifications to their service contract selections, including pricing updates, providing greater transparency.
Optimize order fulfillment by managing order exceptions and viewing live On Time Performance metrics
Order Management Services now has a workflow to automate the handling of exceptions. If an issue happens during the fulfillment request, the system can re-trigger the fulfillment in some problematic status and apply actions such as re-sourcing or sending a notification to the employee about all these fulfillment requests.
Order Management Services can also now provide live insights for On Time Performance by aggregating all the order data in a single place. Consume the insights through SAP Analytics Cloud or connect your favorite analytics tool to gain the desired visibility on your order lifecycle data.
Another enhancement is with SAP Order Management Sourcing and Availability, which now supports using contextual updates to provide alternate sourcing results. This includes an updated customer promise for orders in process that cannot be fulfilled as initially sourced. Order sourcing can also respond at any time with multiple service codes for customers to choose the desired fulfillment methods such as standard or express deliveries.
The benefits with these updates are:
- Improving the ordering experience for customers, to react swiftly to exceptions occurring during order fulfillment
- Providing clear, immediate transparency of order KPIs and trends across all sales channels and fulfillment systems
- Understanding omnichannel sales trends early in time to react in other areas, such as promotions, merchandising, and marketing
Insightful
Intelligent e-commerce powered by AI
In Q4 2023, we introduced SAP CX AI Toolkit to help you infuse Generative AI for your commerce operations. SAP CX AI Toolkit now has a nifty new feature called "Ask the product". Now, shoppers can ask product-specific questions directly on the storefront! Yes, you read that right. Shoppers can receive answers generated by our very own Gen AI, using product data managed in the backend.
Think of the possibilities—whether it's seeking more information about product attributes and details, or unearthing manuals for intricate B2B products, the world's your oyster. The benefits of “Ask the product” are being able to:
- Efficiently locate solutions that are difficult to find within product documentation
- Transform your product attributes and descriptions into solutions for customers
- Improve your commerce experience with direct and immediate support to your storefront
We’ve also expanded Visual Search beyond the retail industry and into all industries. Visual Search improves product discovery by delivering quick and accurate search results based on AI image detection. So, let the searching spree begin!
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| “Ask the product” feature in SAP CX AI Toolkit |
Personalize shopping experiences with a virtual AI advisor
New additions to the SAP Store enhance digital experiences by adding more innovation and services to our ever-expanding ecosystem. We are excited to spotlight the FrontNow partnership, giving your shoppers personalized experiences with the use of an AI advisor in customer interactions. This solution helps maximize conversion rates, increase average order value, and boost customer engagement.
FrontNow is a virtual AI advisor, who will joyfully represent your brand in engaging, one-on-one conversations. Shoppers can chat with this friendly advisor in a whopping 85 languages, obtaining tailor-made shopping and service experiences.
The magic behind this? FrontNow's unique ability to gauge customer interactions and delve deep into conversation intentions to self-discover fresh content areas and trend topics.
FrontNow Advisor multilanguage experience
Adaptive
Empowering customers with self-service capabilities to scale their infrastructure in non-production environments
At times, you may need to increase the performance of your testing environments. Enter SAP’s game-changing scalable sandboxes.
Our scalable sandboxes allow you to selectively ramp up or dial down specific services within non-production environments by allowing the modification of factors such as the number of instances, CPU, and memory requirements.
Furthermore, we're excited to announce SAP Commerce Cloud, consumption credits, which is a virtual currency. This virtual currency is sold as Capacity Units. Using these capacity units, you can self-scale your non-production environments. The SAP Commerce Cloud's consumption credits will be metered and you have complete usage visibility on SAP4Me (planned towards the end of 2024).
You can purchase the SAP Commerce Cloud, consumption credits through your Account Executive to cover the costs for any non-production related infrastructure scaling. Please note that Capacity Units depend on yearly consumption and any unused units at the close of the year won't be carried over.
With scalable sandboxes and SAP Commerce Cloud, consumption credits, customers are:
- Empowered with self-service capabilities to define your own infrastructure needs in non-productive environments
- Lowering costs by scaling only the infrastructure elements required (database, or VMs, etc.) and by scaling tenants down during quiet periods
- Simplifying purchase and consumption of these services through a simple and flexible commercial framework
If you're eager to dive into all the details about scalable sandboxes and Consumption Credits, you can hop over and tune into our recent webcast titled, "Your Key to Agile Scaling! SAP Commerce Cloud, Consumption Credits" webcast.
Capacity Units estimator
Safeguard your deployments when releasing significant updates
Currently, when deploying updates, our safeguards include testing a new release on development, QA, and staging environments before it takes center stage in production.
With blue-green deployments, customers can deploy a green environment right alongside a blue one to test it out before opening it to live traffic.
The game-changer here is the Canary deployment. This feature allows customers to transfer a desired percentage of live traffic to the green environment. Think of it like a soft launch to gain more faith in the new release's compatibility with live users. And guess what - this can be specified per endpoint and/or per service for added peace of mind. The benefits of this approach are:
- Reducing risk by controlling live customer traffic to new SAP Commerce Cloud deployments
- Gaining confidence in significant updates with the ability to smoothly roll-back a deployment with no downtime
- Validating your build and deployment quickly and easily
Canary deployment is only available if you subscribed to the previously mentioned SAP Commerce Cloud, consumption credits.
Ensure production environments remain online with Azure SQL Zonal Redundancy
To ensure that any disruption to Azure availability zones does not put production systems at risk, databases are now automatically replicated to different zones within the same region. The redundancy measure helps increase reliability for all customers.
This redundancy protection is our way of boosting reliability for all our customers, making sure your systems are always-on.
Level-up website security with two-factor authentication
Boost your website security with our enhanced two-factor authentication feature! You can now offer your customers an optional email verification for that extra layer of security during the sign-in process, making it significantly harder for attackers to break into accounts, even if credentials somehow fall into the wrong hands.
The best part is, you're always in the driver's seat – you can turn this verification process on or off whenever you want, by simply toggling a switch. The feature also allows you to set the time duration within which a user must input their one-time password, and the number of attempts they get.
We've also strengthened our password storage encryption. This leverages the latest password encoding strategies to further minimize the potential ramifications of any unforeseen data breaches. Even better, we give you the flexibility to customize your own secure strategy by allowing you to choose your preferred hashing mechanism. So, let's level-up your site security today!
Upgraded rules engine for more secure and stronger Commerce Promotions
We have now upgraded the rules engine for our Commerce Promotions with Drools 8. The upgrade enhances the level of security, improves GDPR compliance, and provides extended functionality. It also has backwards compatibility and delivers a more intuitive user experience.
There is an improved Decision Model and Notation (DMN) to ensure better compliance with the latest standards of DMN for robust decision modelling and execution. This update comes with a modern syntax for rules, which is designed to be more developer-friendly. Even without specialist knowledge, developers will find rule writing more intuitive in the integrated development environments (IDE).
We're also excited about Drools’ incorporated AI Integration capability, enabling customers to create advanced decision-making when plugging in machine learning engines. The new capability empowers businesses to carry out intelligent, adaptive, and autonomous business process automation.
Optimizing your Commerce solution with functional and technical assistance service
When it comes to guidance, our SAP experts are here to lend you or your partner a hand with our functional and technical assistance service. You can receive help from SAP CX experts with one-time, functional or technical expertise in a specified area, such as advisory, configuration, or feature activation. This service provides up to 16 hours of consulting support to help you get over unforeseen hurdles quickly.
Save time and gain control on restarting individual pods
You asked, and we listened. In this highly requested feature, administrators can now restart specific pods as required from the Portal without needing help of SAP Support teams. This saves time and gives customers greater control. You can also see a list of restarted pods to view the logs or do some troubleshooting. To avoid any potential disruption to service performance or availability, we recommend waiting for one pod to finish restarting before trying to restart another.
For more details on the above release features, check out the following resources:
- Q2 2024 SAP Commerce Cloud Release Readiness Kit
- Performance Optimization Best Practices
- SAP Commerce Cloud update cycle
- SAP Commerce Cloud Release Navigator single access point to release content
SAP Help Portal
Composable Commerce
Please share your feedback in a comment and follow our SAP Commerce Cloud topic page to connect with the community!
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