SAP AG announced the availability of the SAP Precision Retailing solution, which is designed to help companies reach consumers at the moment of decision. The enterprise solution delivers personalized offers and suggestions in real time to consumers across multiple channels, including mobile devices, in-store kiosks and websites. According to SAP, the solution resonates beyond the retail sector, and can also be applicable to companies in other industries such as consumer products, transportation, banking and oil and gas that want to get closer to customers and engage in personalized marketing.
“The primary purpose is to put in the hands of the consumer a personal shopping assistant, but that is valuable to the consumer only if the personal shopping assistant gives you relevant information,” Herve Pluche, vice president, Retail Consumer Mobile Initiative, SAP Labs, tells 5 Minute Briefing. “The solution we just launched bridges the gap between the consumer at the point of decision who needs to make a purchase and the ocean of data – and we extract the needle in the haystack – that piece of information that will help the consumer make a decision.”
Precision Retailing aims to address the challenge companies are facing to create direct relationships with consumers while also dealing with the pressure to increase the efficiency of marketing and promotions spending, Pluche says. The solution can help companies create an enhanced shopping experience by collecting and acting on massive amounts of data about consumer behavior in real time and delivering offers for example while a customer is standing in the store aisle or parking their car in front of a store.
SAP Precision Retailing is built on the SAP NetWeaver Cloud platform and data resides in a high performance, in-memory virtualized SAP HANA database. According to SAP, the combination of mobile computing, in combination with HANA, “big data” and cloud, enables interaction directly with consumers.
Retailers have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in an alphabet soup of systems such as CRM, ERP, BI, and POS that support business decisions, and empower executives to do a better job, but there is still a huge untapped potential leveraging the information stored in legacy systems to impact the consumer at the point of decision in real time, Pluche contends.
For more information, go to www.sap.com.