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SAP can play an important role in helping manufacturers transform their business, improving customer centricity, driving growth, and increasing margins. EMC joined forces with SAP to build an e-commerce platform that allows them to move from a product to a solution and services business.
In January 2016, EMC completed the last phase of a multi-year, comprehensive IT transformation. As a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver information technology as a service, EMC serves a diversity of customers, each with unique needs. With the support of SAP MaxAttention, EMC created and implemented an innovative, first-of-its-kind B2B/B2C commerce platform that significantly improves their sales configuration capabilities. This platform enables EMC's sales teams, customers, and channel partners to configure, price, quote, and order products and solutions accurately, efficiently, and with greater flexibility.
In the words of EMC Senior Manager of Platforming Consulting, Ryan Arsenault,
"The unlimited configurability of our products and solutions is a major competitive advantage for our sales force, and EMC needed an agile tool to maintain these tens-of-thousands of rules on a daily basis. Ensuring ease in selling EMC's products makes the salesforce more efficient as well as helps our partners choose to sell EMC instead of one of our competitors."
The only way for EMC to fully articulate their value proposition for customers was to build a fast, easy-to-use CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) process powerful enough to handle the high level of product and service customization. Technically, the new CPQ solution consists of SAP's Solution Sales Configuration (SSC) runtime environment deployed on SAP's Hybris e-commerce platform integrated with SAP ERP/CRM on the backend. While SAP SSC provides EMC with the state-of-the-art solution configuration functionality they need for their highly customizable products and services, SAP Hybris and customized user interfaces built on SAPUI5 provide an intuitive user experience with rich and proper display of content. The final design includes tight integration into EMC's backend SAP CRM on HANA and SAP ERP systems.
MaxAttention played a vital role in ensuring EMC's January 2016 go-live. When EMC began to have significant issues with performance and stability on their new solution, which made the solution virtually unusable, the MaxAttention team had the answers. The team provided the recommendations needed to resolve the issues and restore performance, stability, and usability. MaxAttention was also there to support EMC during their first quarter-end experience with the new solution--a time when EMC sees a sharp spike in customer demand. Everything went smoothly, as all the proactive fine tuning done by MaxAttention, together with SAP Custom Development, enabled the solution to handle the increased volume.
"Getting us successfully through EOQ was the real test, and things could not have gone better. We would not be here without the strong partnership and commitment from SAP, and in retrospect, we could have done even better by involving MaxAttention earlier in design, architecture, and build decisions. We can now happily look forward to sharing our story with others at Sapphire!"
- Kate Parsons, VP of Enterprise Solutions, EMC
This solution is truly innovative for the high level of configurability of products and services it enables. It will be especially appealing to customers in the automotive, computer, and high tech industries--but there's an opportunity here for any industry that has products and services with a high degree of precision and configurability.
Interested to hear how SAP MaxAttention can bring this level of configurability with Hybris and SSC to your company? We're happy to help! Email us at sapinnovationzone_coena@sap.com
