The SAP xApp Sales and Operations Planning (SAP xSOP)

Operating a business company can both rewarding and frustrating. Managing sales and operations has so many tricks and loopholes. But like any challenges, when the right choice of actions are taken, the obstacles can be transformed into factors of business success.

Some of the challenges that companies encounter include downward margin pressure, constrained revenue growth and operating inefficiency.

When a business starts to grow, new products or services will continue to be introduced along with other products with are repacked or evolved. As this happens, things will start to get complicated.

In the past, companies have experienced many sales and operation processes which are not capable of reconciling the perspective of marketing, sales, manufacturing and logistics. When different parts of a company are operating separating with no regular communication, different decision can create confusion. For instance, some departments need aggregated data which are presented in a different dimension that are relevant only to them and not to another.

But with business tools such as the SAP xApp Sales and Operations Planning (SAP xSOP), these complications will never be a problem anymore. As the application promises – things will be "One Business, One Plan".

As a general overview, the SAP xSOP is a family of business solution application designed to make a company establish as single and unified plan in order to move efficiently in the day to day operations.

SAP xSOP primarily helps a company by consolidating business plans. With a consolidate plan, the company can make intensive review and monitoring of critical high level plans affecting all areas of sales and operations such as finance, marketing and customer relations. From this unified plans, effective strategies can be made to gain competitive edge over the competitors.

Data aggregation can be effectively performed by SAP xSOP. With data aggregate, the company can general reports to give the company a time picture of the overall operations. Access to timely and relevant data can be granted to specific roles for security and modularity in the decisions.

In conjunction with SAP NetWeaver, SAP xSOP make efficient planning integration to give company users easy to vital information from other software business solutions. Both SAP and non-SAP applications can work together to give a company a better and consolidate picture all of all data pertaining to planning and better manage the generation of financial plans, demand and supply.

In order to facilitate synchronized tasks among teams and their members, SAP xSOP also includes a Milestone and Process Management feature. With this feature, it would be possible to have multiple working processes in an organized manner with allowance for variations. Tasks can be defined clearly and monitored with ease despite a multitude of simultaneous processes.

SAP xSOP is built on a robust supply and demand planning functionality and extends the area of collaborative business planning to the next level. With this solutions implementation comes reduced total cost of ownership as this leverages on existing IT infrastructure and overall company performance.

The Oracle E-Business Suite Interaction Center

All companies set up goals for growth, no doubt about it. Even in not for profit organizations, the goal of achieving growth is one the important areas of focus.

In a business organization, customers are the main factors that affect growth. They bring in the much needed revenue. But when customers are not managed properly, the could cause the company to lose profits. Hence, the concept of "the more customers, the bigger the profit" does not apply in business. For example, since customers demand should always be attended to, there are unreasonable demands which need delicate handling. So many companies in the past have lost money due to customer mismanagement.

To effectively manage customer, it extremely important to have constant interaction with them to know their needs, wants, opinions and comments. The Oracle E-Business Suite Interaction Center application can take care of these needs.

This family of business applications within the Oracle E-Business Suite can integrate all interaction channels with a company's customers. These channels include emails, telephone, websites and other web services such as voice-over IP calling. The Oracle Interaction Center closely works with other applications in the Oracle E-Business Suite such as Oracle Sales, Service, Contracts and Marketing so that the company can have detailed view of its customers. This can greatly the boost cross selling and upselling as aspect of the business and give the agents quickly interact with customers and answer all their needs. When customers are satisfied, they will stick with the company or even give referrals.

The Interaction Center's Advanced Inbound Telephony integrates all major telephone systems for effective communications with customers. Also, this application can merge with CRM applications so company agents can consistently interact with customers. This application ensures that customers with the most critical needs get top handling wherever channels they are in. This can also seamlessly integrate with such services as eleSales, TeleService and iStore. For management, a web based analytics can manage and monitor the performance of customers and agents interaction.

To complement Advanced Inbound Telephony, there is also the Advanced Outbound Telephony to handling outbound calling campaigns. This features multiple dial modes, progressive dialing, predictive dialing and call recycling.

To manage emails, which is one of the most use communication media, the Oracle Email Center can handle very high volumes of incoming messages. This application can classify emails and route them to respective agents.

The Scripting tool is a great way to customize applications. This can also be used to manage creation, modification and deployment of lead agents for interacting with customers. This can help a company save money by reducing agents training time and giving automated alerts when clients contact the company. A company can make scripts to create or administer surveys to gain specific list of customer prospects. In fact, building scripts, which is often a difficult task, can be made easy with visual layout tools.

Creating an environment where customers and agents have harmonious relationships can result to better profitability and faster growth for the company.

SAP xApp Product Definition (SAP xPD)

Last week, I read an article on my morning newspaper which stated that only 3 percent of new brands have earned more than $50 million in revenues during the last five years. And introductions of new products have nearly doubled in the past decade. These companies are spending a lot of time developing new products and in the end they are having a hard time selling them. If this pattern goes on, it could mean the end of business.

Accordingly the reason for the failure of these new products is that there not enough definition. A research showed that companies introducing new products with very shard definitions of the products could more than triple the selling success rates.

With lack of precise definition of the product, the company would find it hard to capitalize on its best ideas ad promising opportunities.

The SAP xApp Product Definition (SAP xPD) can help companies overcome this particular problem – in an automated way. As their marketing punch line goes: "SAP xPD helps you capitalize on your best ideas and translate them into successful, innovative products"

SAP xPD can help a company in collecting ideas and developing concepts by reaching across the technical and organizational boundaries utilizing data processes and other existing resources. From the data, SAP xPD can give intelligent recommendation on how to produce the kind of products that the customers will want to buy.

The main features of SAP xPD are categorized into Idea Management, Concept Development and Innovation Process Optimization. If one looks at them, they seem to be activities that are hard to simulate. But SAP never runs out of innovation.

Under Idea Management category, the Idea Creation feature collects ideas from different touch points like sales, service, resellers, partners, customers, consumers, marketing and many others so new business opportunities can be triggered. The Idea Categorization helps to ensure that the business owner make follow up and assessment. The Idea Consolidation feature uses a centralized idea pool in identifying new opportunities for business. The Idea Exploration feature helps share the ideas and execute feasibility assessments with cross-functional teams.

Under the Concept Development category, the Concept Creation feature utilizes concept genealogies to share with all process participants the detailed data and explain the rationale for underlying ideas. The Concept Processing feature researches on feasibility of certain concepts based on assumed risks. The Concept Exploration feature identifies all constraints using cross-functional sharing of concept data and information. The Concept Assessment feature links concept evaluation to standardized, transparent criteria related to market attractiveness and technical feasibility.

Under the Innovation Process Optimization, the Concept Portfolio Dashboard offers easy comparison and prioritization of concepts basing on predefined key figures while the Process Analysis feature analyses and optimizes the product innovation process.

These are all the features of SAP xApp and I salute them for this innovative application which I never thought would have been possible.

See you tomorrow with my next xApp blog. If you are reading this one an evening, may good ideas come into your dreams!