This article is an outline of the findings from SAP Saphire 2017, mainly based on the presentation brought by Seema Thomas and Lisa de Souza. The presentation was started with citing MIT Sloan Management review, “Companies with 50% or more of their revenues from digital ecosystems achieve 32% higher revenue growth and 27% higher profit margins [than their industry averages]”  and Accenture’s “only 5% of organizations feel they have mastered digital to a point of differentiation from their competitors” (pdf).  The companies of all sizes are affected by:

• Customer Experience. If customers has a bad experience, they won’t come back.
• Customer Insights. Enables a deeper understanding of the customer’s motivation and intent
• Digital Transformation. The old rules no longer apply. Digital technologies have radically transformed the business landscape.
• The drive for agility.

Past to present

SAP showed the timeline on how hybris was changing from 5.4 to 6.3.

Solution Strategies

Portfolio priorities. SAP highlighted three areas as priorities for 2017:

• Unification
  • Transform into one unified platform
  • Unify user experience
• Integration
  • Standardization of integration technologies
  • Focus on business process integration
  • Multi usage of business objects
  • Mobilize ecosystem
• Cloud
  • Transform with cloud innovations
  • One extension platform
  • Commerce as a service
  • New revenue cloud

Key themes/capabilities in the roadmap

• Commerce Core
  • B2B:
    • ASM adapts to the configuration of the user & their position
    • 3rd party integration: Sales Organization sync
  • Configurable products
  • Enhanced bundles
  • Commerce quotes (Phase II)
  • Interactive features. Guided selling
• Customer Experience
  • Profile-driven personalization. Profile insights.
  • Personalization across Content & Commerce
  • Optimization & A/B-testing
• Order Management
  • Standalone deployment.
  • Order modification. Self-service.
• Master Data Management
  • Backoffice Product Cockpit
  • Product data quality groups
  • Supplier portal
  • Workflow center
• Integration
  • Datahub BP monitoring
  • SAP integration (SAP Hybris Sales Cloud, Returns with S/4 HANA)
• Platform
  • Containerization
  • Cluster management

Commerce Core

Commerce Quotes

• Promotional pricing based on established relationships
• Bundle rules (based on the rule engine)
• Bundle-aware shopping cart

B2B: Sales organization (Phase 2)

Enhancements to automatically include sales unit and buyer unit hierarchies (6.4)

• Seller structure (manual/integrated)
  • Integration with the internal systems
• Seller constraints (used in ASM)
  • Business unit
    • Can be directly assigned to sellers or group of sellers
  • Geolocation
    • Under geolocation use of the business unit corporate address
      • Mark the geolocation as assignable
      • Correlating customer corporate addresses with geolocation devisions
  • Catalog/Category can be assigned to the sellers or group of sales

ASM Customer 360º view (since 6.2)

• Customer agents are able to identify their customer, to relate and assist
• Relevant recommendations
• Promotions & Loyalty
• Customer technologies such as devices, browsers and operating systems enable customer service agents

Promotions

• Staging and preview

Enhanced Bundling

• Bundle-aware promotions
• Rule-based

Customer experience

• By 2020, 50% of digital transformation initiatives will fail due to the lack of an end to-end customer experience operating system (IDC Research, FutureScape Worldwide Chief Marketing officer 2017 Predictions).

CMS SmartEdit

• Enhancements of CMS SmartEdit in 6.4
  • Clone pages
  • Create and edit user group restrictions
  • Improved shared slot support
  • Additional components (CMS link and Product Reference)
  • Improved framework extensibility to support new component types

Personalization Enhancements

• More complex rules for configuration of user segments and display default customizations to anonymous users
• Displaying personalizations to anonymous users
  • Editing personalizations from Combined View of multiple personalizations
• Preview and edit customizations for multiple target groups in context at once

Versioning & Workflow (Q3/17 & Beyond)

• Allow business users to make changes and rollback to previous versions content across content & pages
• The workflow core will be the same, but UI is reworked

Searchandising (Q3/17 & Beyond)

• Search + Personalization
• Boosting products for different target groups
• Using customer insights from SAP hybris profile and other systems to enhance search results

A/B testing and optimization (Q3/17 & Beyond)

• No detailed information

Order management

Standalone deployment of OMS!

Master Data Management

Brand-new Product Cockpit in 6.4

• New Backoffice Product Cockpit!
• Copying/Cloning products between catalogs (Drag&Drop)
• SOLR powered product search in PCM with facets!
• Enhancements in the validation engine (constraints, like wrong format or value is too small etc)
• Data quality groups (validation engine)
• Catalog/Catalog version operations are now integrated into PCM
• Multiple sync rules are supported
• Dynamic interfaces (displaying only relevant fields)
• Synchronization jobs / processes can be easily monitored from backoffice/PCM: progress bar, statuses, aborting etc.

Future plans (Q3 & Beyond)

• Supplier portal
• Product Comparision in backoffice
• Enhanced Collaboration:
  • Workflows & Tasks,
  • Workflow center
  • Workflow Visualization
• Excel export/import

SAP Integration

© Rauf Aliev, May 2017