SAP AG today announced that companies across diverse industries have successfully deployed the new customer relationship management application from SAP in record time to deliver superior value to their customers. By selecting the SAP CRM application over competitive CRM offerings, industry leaders, including eBay, Royal Philips Electronics, Eastman Chemical, Home Shopping Europe, Apotex, StatoilHydro, Bank fuer Sozialwirtschaft and Wuerth Group, are able to leverage insights across the enterprise in order to engage with customers in exciting and innovative ways.
Further showing SAP’s momentum, the leading independent research firm Gartner Inc. has once again ranked SAP as the No. 1 CRM vendor worldwide. According to Gartner, SAP leads the CRM market with a total market share of 25.35 percent based on total software revenue, placing it nine percentage points over its closest competitor.(1)
SAP CRM Enables Interaction With eBay’s Top Customers in Europe
eBay has a global presence in 39 markets and approximately 83.9 million active users worldwide; a great deal of those trade on eBay’s European marketplaces. The quality of its business relationships to key customers — PowerSellers, top sellers and top buyers — is critical to the success of the company. In 2007, eBay decided to implement a new CRM solution to increase the satisfaction of these key accounts, as well as to drive the overall productivity of its business. eBay selected SAP CRM to support its customer interaction center for European markets. The company implemented the interaction center and the business intelligence functionalities of the application. The clear CRM roadmap and SAP’s commitment to CRM led eBay to select SAP CRM. The first European eBay country organization went live in May 2008, the last one will follow in August.
Royal Philips Electronics Excites Sales Users
Royal Philips Electronics (Sector Consumer Lifestyle), leader in healthcare, lighting and consumer lifestyle products, went live on SAP CRM 2007 with a team of sales force automation users in Canada.
“Our sales reps rave about the improved ease-of-use of the SAP CRM 2007 application, which was adopted faster than ever,” said Geert van de Ven, program manager, Royal Philips Electronics. “Due to the successful implementation, we plan to expand our rollout of SAP CRM 2007 to additional users later this year.”
Eastman Chemical Captures Comprehensive Customer Interactions
As a major producer of chemicals, fibers and plastics, Eastman Chemical requires a high degree of visibility into customer interactions in order to maintain customer satisfaction levels and support growth strategies. Eastman deployed SAP CRM to capture a more robust view of these customer interactions and provide improved support for sales.
“Our emphasis is on service and insight into customer relationships,” said Bob Strickler, technical lead, Interaction Center project, Eastman Chemical. “The interaction center functionality of SAP CRM will quickly and easily enable us to capture interactions and create the 360-degree view of the customer for all account team members. Thanks to the flexibility and scalability of SAP CRM, we plan to complete the deployment to all our CSRs in North America by the end of this year, and finish the global deployment by mid-2009. We could not have embarked on such an ambitious undertaking without the capabilities provided by SAP CRM.”
Customer is King at Home Shopping EuropeGmbH
As one of the leading shopping television channels in Germany, HSE24 (Home Shopping EuropeGmbH) has identified the multichannel approach as the key success factor for generating superior customer value. Customers can access HSE24’s offerings via TV, the HSE24 Web site, telephone, e-mail or print publications. In March 2007, HSE24 bundled its ‘customer is king’ modernization program, where the company switched the management of customer information and service requests to SAP CRM.
With SAP CRM 2007 available, the company decided to upgrade its systems immediately and extend the scope of functionality covered by the SAP system. SAP CRM 2007 allows HSE24 to integrate internal business units, external services providers and interfaces to the back-end systems as well as to the Internet shop on a single platform. With the SAP application, HSE24 is successfully managing data of more than 6 million customers, 500,000 products and 70,000 daily order entries, with 800 call center specialists who can access the CRM system at the same time.
Apotex Lowers Cost of Customer Service Operations
Apotex, the largest Canadian-owned pharmaceutical company, uses SAP CRM 2007 and the SAP(R: 67.66, -0.69, -1.00%) NetWeaver Portal component as a platform to deliver online value-added services to pharmacists, healthcare professionals and students.
“With over 12,000 Internet customers and internal users utilizing SAP CRM 2007, we were able to consolidate five separate databases and manual processes onto one common platform,” said Michael Davidson, CIO, Apotex. “This enables us to effectively track marketing programs and customer activity. The effort reduced our administrative costs and improved our visibility into customer profitability.”
StatoilHydro Drives Top Line Revenue Growth
StatoilHydro is the largest seller of oil products in Scandinavia, with more than 29,000 employees in 40 countries.
“We upgraded to SAP CRM 2007 in just three months, going live in May 2008,” said Trond Grahnstedt, project manager, StatoilHydro. “With the rapid rollout to 410 users in our Scandinavian subsidiaries, SAP CRM 2007 is keeping our sales pipeline filled. We plan to extend our use of the application to both e-commerce and complaints management functionalities in the future.”
Bank fuer Sozialwirtschaft Strengthens Customer Orientation
Bank fuer Sozialwirtschaft (BfS), based in Cologne, Germany, selected the SAP for Banking solution portfolio in 2005 to replace a legacy core banking solution. Just two years later, BfS enhanced its SAP application landscape with a preconfigured banking solution based on SAP CRM 2007. The solution provides a consistent and comprehensive 360-degree view of all accounts and prospects for all customer-facing front- and back-office employees. Focus areas include customer and prospect management, opportunity and activity management, as well as pipeline performance management. The ease of use of SAP CRM 2007 was a key reason for BfS to select SAP and it is further supported by the integration of Microsoft Office applications with SAP CRM.
Adolf Wuerth GmbH & Co. KG Leverages End-to-End Processes to Strengthen Customer Relationships
The Wuerth Group is one of the world’s leading companies in fixing and assembly materials, including screws, dowels and plugs, chemical products and other tools. To strengthen relationships with its customers, Adolf Wuerth GmbH & Co. KG searched for a CRM solution both able to support the industry-specific requirements of the construction industry and capable of integrating deeply with its existing SAP application landscape. As one of the first companies worldwide to do so, AWKG selected SAP CRM 2007. The application is combined with an industry-specific solution of SAP partner movento and allows comprehensive key-account management for the company’s project-driven business. Additional benefits for AWKG were generated by the deep integration of SAP CRM 2007 into its existing deployment of SAP’s flagship enterprise resource planning application, SAP ERP, leading to tremendous improvements in efficiency.
SAP’s Co-Innovation Commitment
SAP continues to build momentum by engaging closely with customers and partners to further enhance its solutions and help customers exceed their business goals.
“By collaborating closely with our customers and partners, SAP is able to deliver cutting edge solutions that uniquely leverage the strength of our end-to-end process platform, which simply cannot be offered by any other provider,” said Jujhar Singh, senior vice president, CRM Product Management, SAP. “As a result, businesses are embracing SAP CRM 2007 on a global scale in an effort to interact more closely with and provide unmatched value to their customers, and thereby gain a greater competitive edge.”
SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) is an important component of the SAP Business Suite. With an eye toward empowering the growing business user market, this breakthrough product has been co-innovated with leading customers and partners, and is designed to be simple and powerful to solve real business problems. SAP CRM offers capabilities such as trade promotions management, business communications management and pipeline performance management. SAP CRM features a dynamic user interface that gives business users the power to easily access all relevant information to best serve customers.
Source – http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/markets/industries/industrials/sap-customers-worldwide-tout-early-success-latest-crm-offering/
SAP*BYTE 