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amycross
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
1,134
For over five decades, consumer product companies have thought in terms of only two consumer moments - the moment a consumer bought something in the store and the moment the consumer used that product in the home. Companies strategized in terms of a linear path-to-purchase with defined touchpoints designed to influence a transaction or the purchase of a product. The operating model was based on a very well-defined and static set of definitions of consumer products, wholesale, retail, and favored economies of scale, creating competitive advantages and barriers to entry that favored large, established brands.​

Moments of opportunity

Today, the challenge of consumer product companies is to meet consumers in moments of opportunity. And these moments may or may not be in a store and may or may not result in a purchase. Innovative consumer product companies are now taking a broader view of the consumer journey and working to deliver personalized experiences within the context of the outcomes the consumer is trying to achieve. These companies are defining themselves less in traditional industry terms and more in terms of the ecosystems in which they compete, including looking beyond products to complementary content and services. And, today’s environment favors speed. Miss the moment, miss the opportunity! Agile, flexible companies that can meet consumers directly in moments of opportunity will be the new market leaders.​

The moments of opportunity approach to the business demands greater agility, resiliency, skilled talent across the enterprise, and the shift to more network thinking. Also, consumer product companies need to properly balance not only top-line growth and bottom-line results (which they have always strived for), but they now must balance the green-line, in terms of being environmentally responsible. This allows for needing to grow their margins in sustainable ways.


Innovating your business

Business transformation and innovation is about improving company performance by continuously cultivating employee skillsets, providing business users with capable systems, ensuring the availability of high-quality data, and establishing business processes that enable and support the achievement of company objectives.

With today’s market trying to find new ways to earn revenue and maximize profits, the standardized and baseline processes that run in the digital core systems and line of business cloud applications aren’t enough. Consumer product companies need to open up every step of their core solutions’ modernized processes and inject other elements (integration, intelligence, workflows, exception handling, conversational UX, bots, analytics, etc.) to run at their best. This allows companies to turn business innovation into a core business process itself, so that there are always learning and improvement opportunities, and the ability to move faster – rather than innovation being a series of one-off, manual initiatives.

At SAP, we want to help our customers leverage all the best practices and investments they have made over the years in their existing systems, while moving to the more modern and flexible cloud architectures that are so clearly now part of future landscapes. Companies need a business technology platform to provide new customer value, while at the same time increasing efficiency and lowering costs, and doing their part to help make the world a better place, with improved sustainability and other social initiatives.

The business technology platform for consumer product companies

SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) is a unified, business-centric, and open platform that empowers customers and our ecosystem to innovate, build, extend, and integrate SAP and non-SAP applications in a cloud-native way. It enables next generation data management, real-time insights, and holistic enterprise planning. It also provides application development, integration, and process automation capabilities. SAP BTP embeds intelligence into our line of business applications and provides enterprise artificial intelligence capabilities. The platform gives access to prepackaged lines of business and industry business-centric content, extensions, and applications, provided by SAP and our ecosystem, through a digital marketplace.


 

SAP BTP gives three overarching advantages to our consumer product customers:

  • Unified: SAP BTP offers a unified experience that spans a wide variety of scenarios around integration, application development, data and analytics, and intelligence

  • Business-centric: SAP BTP features are focused on improving the business outcomes companies can achieve. The platform offers process- and data-specific tooling that helps organizations rapidly build and extend SAP applications. Business services and prepackaged content help users meet domain-specific requirements and develop focused data analysis scenarios.

  • Open: Companies need flexibility when it comes to how they deploy and run business processes and IT systems. Because SAP BTP is open, organizations can choose how to build and extend – on a hyperscaler cloud infrastructure, in SAP data centers, etc.


Customer value

With a rich heritage that dates back to 1748, Villeroy & Boch Group is one of Europe’s oldest brands. Sold to customers in 125 countries, its premium bathroom ceramics and tableware combine timeless style with innovative design. To optimize productivity, the company needed its processes to be as efficient as possible and wanted to reduce time-spent on repetitive tasks. By harnessing the latest intelligent robotic process automation and artificial intelligence technologies from SAP BTP, the manufacturer has developed automation bots to carry out routine, low-value tasks and make ERP processes intelligent. This is enabling improvements in operational efficiency and frees up staff to spend time on non-routine and higher-value activities.

SAP customers are already running our mission-critical core solutions. We are your ongoing partner, and we know and understand your industry trends, and how you want to succeed. With SAP BTP, you can inject that future-proof innovation right into your existing solutions and become an intelligent, sustainable enterprise.

Get started with SAP BTP for free!