This article outlines the findings from SAP Sapphire 2017, mainly based on the presentation by Seema Thomas and Lisa de Souza.

The presentation started by citing the 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).

Companies of all sizes are affected by:

• Customer Experience. If customers have 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 of how hybris changed 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 the user experience
• Integration
  • Standardization of integration technologies
  • Focus on business process integration
  • Multiple uses of business objects
  • Mobilize the ecosystem
• Cloud
  • Transform with cloud innovations
  • One extension platform
  • Commerce as a service
  • New revenue cloud

Key Themes and Capabilities in the Roadmap

• Commerce Core
  • B2B:
    • ASM adapts to the configuration of the user and 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
  • Data Hub BP monitoring
  • SAP integration (SAP Hybris Sales Cloud, returns with S/4HANA)
• 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 internal systems
• Seller constraints (used in ASM)
  • Business unit
    • Can be directly assigned to sellers or groups of sellers
  • Geolocation
    • Under geolocation, use the business unit corporate address
      • Mark the geolocation as assignable
      • Correlating customer corporate addresses with geolocation divisions
  • Catalog/category can be assigned to sellers or groups of sellers

ASM Customer 360º View (Since 6.2)

• Customer agents are able to identify their customers, relate to them, and assist them
• 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 to 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 configuring user segments and displaying default customizations to anonymous users
• Displaying personalizations to anonymous users
  • Editing personalizations from the 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 roll back to previous versions of content across content and pages
• The workflow core will be the same, but the 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 comparison in Backoffice
• Enhanced collaboration:
  • Workflows & tasks
  • Workflow center
  • Workflow visualization
• Excel export/import

SAP Integration

© Rauf Aliev, May 2017