SAP Customer Activity Repository Solutions
SAP Customer Activity Repository (CAR) solutions helps businesses to enhance customer experience, accelerate decision making, improve demand planning, and maximize promotion effectiveness. This powerful data platform prepares cross-channel data by collating, cleansing, and centralizing your customer and point-of-sale (POS) data in real time for analysis and prepares it for consumption by other applications.
Applexus, as a tightly integrated partner with SAP on the CAR solution from its inception, brings unparalleled expertise in maximizing the business benefits that you can achieve through CAR. By combining deep knowledge of product architecture and business processes, our consultants are able to adapt SAP CAR to meet your unique needs.
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As an early adopter of SAP CAR and co innovation partner of SAP, Applexus brings a unique blend of industry and product expertise, proprietary tools, methodologies, and accelerators to enable a successful implementation. We bring deep product architectural knowledge to adapt SAP CAR for optimal solutioning in complex business scenarios and technical landscapes.
- Experience implementing SAP CAR for SAP and non-SAP scenarios.
- Team of industry veterans with end-to-end business process knowledge
- Access to our unique tools and methodology – ‘RunningStart’ for SAP CAR
- Applexus' Industry Focus Solution for CAR for faster time-to-value
- Unique experience building partner apps leveraging SAP CAR
- Applexus Add-ons to SAP CAR – Store Reconciliation, Payment Reconciliation and CAR analytics Use cases
Customer activity repository
Applexus helps customers implement SAP CAR to collect retail sales data from multiple channels for faster business decisions. Powered by lightning-fast SAP HANA in-memory technology, SAP CAR offers real-time inventory visibility, POS data transfer, sales analytics, and demand forecasting.
We can help you to
- Gather multichannel customer and POS data to discover and visualize real time insights.
- Forecast demand to optimize upstream business processes and decisions
- Personalize marketing through targeted promotions and product assortments
- Improve consumer experience with a real-time view of inventory and on-shelf availability.
- Simplify your IT landscape with a single, unified data repository
Promotion Management
Leveraging SAP Promotion Management for Retail( PMR), Applexus can help to design and execute the most effective offers to customers. SAP PMR helps reach shoppers across all channels, including e-commerce, with multi-channel promotional strategies. Speed up promotion planning and execution by facilitating collaboration among marketing, merchandising, advertising, and finance teams.
Features of PMR
- Identify offers that will be most profitable based on shopper demand
- Reduce the time required to plan and execute a promotional event
- Target specific locations and products through focused marketing and merchandising offers
- Manage advertising budget by better understanding the expected financial performance of each offer
Allocation Management
All fashion retailers and most of the non-fashion retailers require advanced tools to plan their initial or in-season allocation to stores. SAP Allocation Management for Retail provides intuitive tools to business users to to plan their initial or in-season allocation to stores. SAP Allocation Planning to eliminate the cumbersome manual work and high possibility of lost sales.
- Define the parameters on the level of product groups, stores or distribution centers to provide business users with system-proposed allocation plans.
- Enhanced functionality allows for automated allocation processes at a custom level defined by the business.
- Launch new fashion articles for the first time in your retail in-store based on target stocks.
- Facilitate automatic fill-in during seasonal periods.
Merchandise Planning
SAP Merchandise Planning for Retail, helps retailors to go through the planning process where the objectives are planned revised and executed across different departments. Retailers can work on KPIs such as sales, purchasing budgets, margin or shrinkage goals with several versions and also monitor the progress based on the plans.
- Create companywide merchandise plan from the Forecasting data of UDF
- Develop sales, margin, inventory, and receipt flow at various levels of the merchandise, channel and time hierarchies
Assortment Planning
SAP Assortment Planning for Retail helps retailors to plan their merchandise across stores by identifying performing products and optimize assortments to gain maximum profit. SAP Assortment planning leverages data science and prediction.
- Use predictive algorithms to model product groups across selling channels
- Plan sales and purchase quantities by location clusters.
- Provide initial allocation instructions using approved purchase quantities.
Store Replenishment
Store replenishment is the latest add-on to CAR from SAP that leverages automation to enable faster replenishment planning while optimizing the ordering costs. This is primarily focused on the fresh products and supports replenishment configuration, planning, simulation, and alert management to accommodate the changing replenishment requirements. It is an app on top of CAR that works by importing data from SAP ERP into the Demand Data Foundation module of SAP CAR
Key features
- Optimized ordering costs for each product at a specific store
- Intraday replenishment with improved demand consideration for order quantities
- Determination of order quantities based on real time inventory data
- Improved orders through prediction of expected spoilage
SAP Customer Activity repository (CAR) has essential and extensive capabilities to support a retailer’s omni-channel execution and planning requirements. However, there are 3 areas where Applexus has improved SAP CAR's business value through better functionality and user experience – Store Reconciliation, Payment Reconciliation and Applexus CAR Analytics Use Cases.
Challenge
Retailers typically need to manage many stores with multiple types of transactions such as sales, returns, gift cards, coupons, tax etc. that need to be reconciled by store by day. Currently CAR’s POS workbench provides reconciliation through balancing information that is difficult to access and doesn’t necessarily give the types of balancing among tender types and over/shorts that auditors want to see for their business. And that store/day balancing “tab” is difficult to access in the standard user interface POS workbench. The standard CAR interface requires additional manual efforts to complete the reconciliation.
Applexus solution
Applexus Store Reconciliation add-on solution is a comprehensive and convenient user interface and has functionality that allows retailers to reconcile at a higher level than the POS Workbench more easily. Store Reconciliation can easily be configured allowing for maximum flexibility and use by each retailer to view their balancing information differently while also providing the ability to drill down to individual transactions for full visibility.
Key benefits of Applexus Store Reconciliation Add-On
- Integration with SAP’s Customer Activity Repository (CAR)
- Flexibility to define the types of sources of transactions and payments as well as financial transactions to be reconciled
- Faster reconciliation with increased accuracy
- Sales auditor productivity gains that can be focused on higher-value tasks
Challenge
Standard SAP & solutions do not offer any support for reconciling customer credit cards, checks, gift cards and other payment types to the individual sales transactions for all sales channels. With non-cash transactions representing a larger and larger portion of a retailer’s transactions, this poses a considerable challenge for business operations. Inhouse payment reconciliation is most often a manual process making it slow and prone to errors. Moreover, locating the individual out-of-balance transactions can be quite difficult. Retailers have typically relied on 3rd party solutions outside of SAP and CAR, or significant customizations for this added capability. These solutions can be slow and expensive.
Applexus Solution
Applexus has created an add-on solution embedded in CAR which is the source of all omni-channel sales transactions to automate the reconciliation between multiple payment processor data and the CAR omni-channel sales data. Applexus Payment Reconciliation provides a side-by-side comparison of -sale transactions and payment processor data that accelerates reconciliation with increased accuracy and efficiency. The reconciliation can be done by store, by day with the ability to drill down to the individual transactions.
Key benefits of Applexus Payment Reconciliation Add-On
- Embedded within SAP’s Customer Activity Repository (CAR)
- Reduced costs associated with third-party reconciliation processors
- Faster payment reconciliation with increased accuracy
- Employee productivity gains that can be focused on higher-value tasks
- Ability to drill down to the individual out-of-balance transactions
Affinity/Market Basket Analysis
Understanding customer purchasing patterns through analysis of how products are purchased together
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Loss Prevention
Systematic insights that highlight loss trends and patterns and identify processes, products, vendors and associates that result in high losses
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Assortment Optimization
Insights into assortment gaps (both across products and across stores), underperforming products and underserved customer needs.
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Price Optimization Solution
A comprehensive solution that leverages pricing strategies, rules and statistical modeling to recommend optimal regular prices
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With deep functional expertise in SAP, Applexus has developed an Industry Focus solution for CAR. A working demonstration of the solution is showcased to our clients along with pre-built user stories and workshop material to ensure an accelerated implementation helping our clients realize value quicker.
Applexus RunningStart for SAP CAR comes with prepackaged configuration, test data and collateral documents which will help to reduce the implementation time and then cost of the SAP CAR projects. Leveraging the SAP Activate methodology, Applexus adapts your processes to fit with the SAP standard products and industry best practices, resulting in a lower TCO and the benefits of industry best practices. Leveraging our IFS for CAR and our unique RunningStart methodology, we simplify all phases of your deployment project from discovery through user adoption
Our unique approach would help you…
- Reduce total cost by 30-50% as compared to traditional on-premises implementations
- Adhere to standard functionality, control of updates/upgrades, extensibility
- Facilitate organizational change management and readiness
- Deliver a great user experience with a customizable UI
- Reduce time to market and enable rapid adoption
PODCAST
APPLEXUS EXPERT SERIES
Shelley Schwartz, Applexus Retail Practice Lead shares with us the importance of SAP CAR for the retail industry and the add-on solutions developed by Applexus that can dramatically enhance the power of SAP CAR and the value it brings to retailers. Watch this podcast series to explore the different pathways in which you can leverage SAP CAR to the benefit of your retail platforms and much more.
Is SAP CAR right for you?
SAP CAR – Why Retailers Need This Tool
How can retail organizations undertake a smooth SAP CAR implementation?
Kiran Gasmar
Associate Director Products & Solutions
