Introducing SAP Cloud for Customer for Utilities

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This month SAP expanded our portfolio of customer engagement solutions by introducing SAP Cloud for Customer for Utilities, a cloud solution designed to specifically to address the needs of companies in the utilities industry.  Building on top of the acclaimed SAP Cloud for Customer solution, this initial release is focused on the business-to-business selling motion that utilities engage in, and is the first step towards offering a solution that enables all aspects of customer engagement from demand to after-sales service.

SAP Cloud for Customer for Utilities delivers next generation “Lead-to-Quote” sales solution for utilities to engage with their commercial and industrial customers to capture insights, build better relationships, and close more deals.  The key benefits that customers will experience are:

• Increased Productivity – With robust pre-call planning tools, sales people will spend less time preparing for customer conversations and more time selling.
• Increased Efficiency – Simple and effective post-call capture and collaboration tools empower sales people to quickly capture call notes and coordinate follow-up actions during or after the call.
• Shorter Sales Cycles – Powerful quotation management functionality enables sales people to quickly convert customer interest into a quote, anywhere, anytime.

Built on the robust and flexible SAP HANA Cloud Platform, this solution can support every type of sales process from the simple to the most complex.  The solution includes Core CRM features that span:

• Account & Contact Management
• Lead, Opportunity, and Activity Management
• Quote Creation
• Email & Calendar Integration

It also includes utilities-specific capabilities for account teams that include:

• A Customer Factsheet that displays an account summary with customer details as well as recent activities and interactions with notes.
• Business Agreements that store mutually agreed upon terms for long-term business relationships with a customer, including payment terms and methods, set ups bill-to-party, correspondence party, and dunning process.
• Quotation Management with the features like checklists, data capture and validation, status tracking,
• Service Location with the ability to create, update, and edit connection object, premise, and point of delivery details.
• Packaged Integration with the SAP Business Suite solution for the Utilities Industry to allow account teams to work in a single solution but leverage a complete view of the customer.

Additionally, this enterprise-class cloud solution delivers analytics to help sales teams understand their pipelines and the profitability of their business.  These analytics come in the form of easily configurable interactive reports, contextual sales insights based on real-time customer information, and embedded reports that track sales cycles, wins and losses, and revenue trends.  These reports, as well as the rest of the application functionality are available either via a browser or on the iPad and in a variety of languages including English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese.

To learn more about this and other SAP solutions for utilities, visit SAP on the web at: http://www.sap.com/solution/industry/utilities.html