There has been a lot of information floating around solutions such as SAP C/4HANA and/or SAP S/4HANA Customer Management, which can leave customers wondering which direction they should go with their existing SAP CRM solution. In this blog post, I will lay out some trends and explain why SAP C/4HANA is the right choice for you.
Changing landscapes
In 2008, on-premise solutions were preferred by 88% of businesses. Fast-forward to
2019, and that number has dropped to
13% (
Source: Softwareadvice.com). In fact, according to a recent study by Gartner, in
2019, more than
70% of CRM software was deployed as
software as a service.
Businesses are increasingly looking to use CRM away from its traditional capabilities and instead using it in areas such as:
Marketing – Journey analytics, account-based marketing, and AI
Sales – Predictive analytics, sales training solutions, and mobile sales productivity
Service – AI and chat bots, social media management, and self-service
Commerce – Personalization, API-oriented architecture, and subscription
SAP can help your business achieve it's goals with the help of SAP C/4HANA.
What is SAP C/4HANA?
As existing SAP CRM On-premise customers, you are already familiar with the concept of a Business Suite. As customers of SAP CRM, you have implemented functionality in areas of Sales, Service, Marketing and Commerce.
SAP C/4HANA is the collective name of the customer experience suite of
cloud based solutions running on SAP Cloud Platform. The suite consists of the following solutions: SAP Sales Cloud. SAP Service Cloud, SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Customer Data Cloud.
So why should you consider moving to SAP C/4HANA?
Apart from the aspect of total cost of ownership, there are inherent advantages that the cloud-based SAP C/4HANA suite has over the on-premise SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application.
1. User Experience
A well-designed CRM doesn’t just have all the right fields or features—it also arranges them in a way that makes it easy for the user to learn and use it. SAP C/4HANA has been built keeping this aspect in mind on the forefront and provides capabilities such as:
- Screens that can be easily tailored to meet the needs of the users
- Display highly personalized product information, customer data, and recommendations
- Users can quickly navigate, get informed and take action
- Simplified and common user experience across devices
- Responsive UI which conforms to the device type
2. Embedded intelligence
SAP C/4HANA is investing heavily in the areas of AI, conversational UI and analytics with
Machine learning. This improves the ability to make use of
real-time data to both improve the customer experience and sell more in context of the customer. ML is embedded within the business processes and today we already have
20+ scenarios available such as
:
- Pipeline Management - AI based scoring leveraging various factors such as 'communication frequency', 'deal value' etc. that helps to identify critical deals and accounts
- Quote Management - AI powered guided selling which suggested products based on similar customer needs and margin protections
- Self Service - Using chat-bots to solve customer requests
- Customer Service - Automatically classify tickets based on data from structured and unstructured (e.g. emails) and route it to the correct agent
- Segmentation - Predictive and rule based scoring capabilities for customer classifications
3. Mobility
Solutions within SAP C/4HANA such as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, were built mobile first. While you can indeed have some point to point mobile apps built to be used on top of SAP CRM, where SAP C/4HANA solutions have the advantage are in the areas of:
- Offline capabilities - which enable uninterrupted customer engagement and improved productivity
- Device agnostic - Can be used on any device type - desktop, tablet or smartphones
- Deployment - Simple plug and play from the app stores
- Calendar management - Synchronize Outlook, Gmail and Lotus notes across all device types (tablet, desktop and smartphones)
4. Business Agility
The ability to quickly adapt to changing business needs such as changes to prices, bundles, rules, and business process flows all of which can be done in
minutes or days vs.
weeks or months.
- Personlization - Users can easily personalize their workplace with simple 'drag and drop' or using 'toggle' buttons
- Reports - Users can configure reports they want quickly and easily using a wizard without going to IT.
- UI Localization - Adapt and customize User Interface experience (e.g. add custom fields, translate labels, change layouts based on a business rules) without coding
5. Speed of Innovation
Say goodbye to the days of waiting for a year to get new features and then go through an expensive upgrade process with SAP CRM. Now with SAP C/4HANA you can:
- Access latest innovations delivered via seamless quarterly releases
- Receive continuous updates to functionality, security, usability, patches and bug fixes
- Address functional gaps in weeks not years
On top of all this, you can reduce your TCO by leveraging SAP C/4HANA’s robust developer tools, prebuilt integrations, industry-specific solutions, configuration tool-sets, wizards, rich set of publicly available Odata and SOAP web service API’s and micro-services which enables fast implementation with improved flexibility, and a multi cloud and ecosystem connection.
JOIN THE SAP C/4HANA Movement
For questions or to learn more about the next steps, please send an email to
sap.c4hanamove@sap.com
To learn more details on the value proposition please follow the link below:
https://open.sap.com/courses/cx1/question/0c4f3b3e-e1c4-4fcf-8997-d688cb5670a6
