Johannesburg, 23 Nov 1999
South African organisations using enterprise resource planning (ERP) are looking to empower mobile employees through providing customer management solutions on pervasive, handheld devices.
That's the feedback from the largest ERP conference on the African continent, the SAP User Group's Saphila '99 event. At the conference and exhibition, attended by over 1 700 delegates, SAP Southern Africa demonstrated its Mobile Sales and Mobile Service offerings running on the HP Jornada, a Windows CE-based personal digital assistant (PDA), utilising SAP's Internet business solution, mySAP.com.
"Customer relationship management (CRM) vendors need to provide companies with increased flexibility for managing their relationships with customers by providing employees access to the key integrated information and business processes they need - any time and anywhere, whether online, offline or in combination," comments Simon Carpenter, general manager: new dimension applications at SAP Southern Africa.
"At the exhibition, we demonstrated our ability to deliver CRM solutions through mySAP.com that empower mobile employees to integrate and utilise data with a range of hand held and portable devices - and it was extremely well received," says Carpenter.
He points out that in many companies today, at least 20 percent of employees work out of the office on a regular basis, according to Forrester Research Inc. Forrester estimates that 62 percent of employees in these companies will be working remotely by 2000.
Although only announced officially at SAP's Asian user group conference, SAPPHIRE Singapore recently, SAP already has customers implementing pervasive SAP CRM solutions to drive new business, gain tremendous efficiency and support new approaches to complete customer care.
The pervasive SAP CRM solutions give customers a highly flexible, easy-to-use, task-specific option that can be rapidly implemented, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership than with traditional hardware platforms. Supported devices include personal digital assistants such as Palm Pilot, information terminals such as Sharp Zarus, handheld PCs and smart phones. Supported operating systems include Windows CE and the PalmOS.
One of the first implementations of this solution is taking place at Wuerth Japan, a direct sales distributor of assembly and fastening technologies, and is due to go live by December this year. Because of its unique direct sales model, Wuerth Japan worked closely with SAP to provide access to its key business processes through handheld devices and mySAP.com software solutions as part of its strategy to drive current business as well as create new opportunities.
The pervasive SAP CRM solutions provide the Wuerth Japan sales team with real-time technology and Windows CE-based devices to sell merchandise out of its vans, conduct credit sales and use a Web-enabled client to deliver personalised sales and service to its customers. In addition, Wuerth Japan chose hosted applications, another key element of mySAP.com, to reduce costs and on-site maintenance.
"Our sales force is constantly on the go," said Satoshi Ueda, president of Wuerth Japan. "We needed solutions that would enable us not only to capture sales data, receive payments on site and provide customers with receipts, but to do availability checks and make delivery promises when the stock is not on hand. Our close work with SAP allows us to provide each team member with inexpensive and easy-to-use handheld devices to accomplish these goals and keep our customers coming back. In addition, we saw strong benefits in selecting hosted applications. Only the mySAP.com environment met all of our needs - handheld devices, hosted applications and quick implementation."
Carpenter says other examples of SAP customers using SAP CRM solutions on pervasive devices include a major consumer products manufacturer that equips its more than 25,000 retailers to enter orders remotely using Windows CE-based devices instead of staffing a manual inventory replenishment operation; a leading distributor of maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) supplies that uses Palm Pilots to do available-to-promise (ATP) checks; and an engineering and construction company that uses smart phones to better enable its service technicians to get to the customer, finish their repairs and report back on time spent and materials used.
SAP is now working with Microsoft to link Windows CE and other mobile devices to SAP business solutions through business process integration over the Internet via the BizTalk Framework. This joint project creates pervasive computing networks capable of delivering information to devices regardless of their location.
With the launch of mySAP.com, SAP provides an open collaborative business environment of personalised solutions on demand. SAP provides a standardised infrastructure that can support the hardware, middleware and connectivity requirements of pervasive solutions with the Internet-Business Framework, an overall integration framework and methodology designed to support all types of applications and technologies.
"As mobile devices evolve and customer needs change," comments Carpenter, so the Internet-Business Framework architecture allows companies not only to adapt the solution to fit new business needs, but to easily transfer their pervasive scenarios to new or different devices as they become available." He says the corporate data and business processes will remain stable during the adjustment because they are part of the broader mySAP.com environment.
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