SAP has announced the SAP Customer Activity Repository application, a new retail data repository powered by the SAP HANA platform. SAP Customer Activity Repository is intended to support retailers in becoming more customer-centric by bringing together customer, sales and inventory information from siloed applications. A unified view of the customer shall help retailers drive consistent experiences across all channels and improve business efficiencies, profitability and brand perception. The announcement was made at the SAP Retail Forum North America, being held on October 7-9 in Dallas, Texas.
SAP Customer Activity Repository aims to empower retailers with consumer insights by consolidating customer interactions from stores, online and mobile channels with insight from social media feedback such as Twitter or Facebook posts. The information shall act as the basis for a “single source of truth” to help retailers optimize branding, marketing, promotions, pricing, merchandising, inventory management processes and more.
“As consumers expand their shopping experiences across multiple purchase channels, retailers have an opportunity to engage more fully and provide more personal interactions,” said Lori Mitchell-Keller, global head, Industry Business Unit Retail, SAP. “This is a daunting task, requiring access to multiple databases and tools. With SAP Customer Activity Repository, retailers will have access to powerful consumer insights, be able to centralize critical business data and run reports instantly, and make better business decisions that support both sales and the customer experience.”
SAP HANA helps businesses make smarter, faster decisions through real-time analysis and reporting combined with dramatically accelerated business processes. As the backbone of SAP Customer Activity Repository, it is intended to deliver lightning-fast insight at a user-determined level of detail, helping eliminate the time needed to handle multiple data transactions in the point-of-sale (POS) transaction log, other sales channels and reporting systems.
“To present our brand to a growing base of digital natives and active sports enthusiasts, providing information right now is a key differentiator,” said Stephen McDonnold, CIO, PGA TOUR Superstore. “Utilizing SAP Customer Activity Repository and SAP HANA will allow us to provide instantaneous inventory availability, targeted promotions and cross-channel fulfillment to our on-the-go consumers.”
SAP Customer Activity Repository is intended to help retailers establish the foundational data that can be used to better understand customer demand and predict future buying behavior. Features such as real-time visibility into consumer sales data down to the transaction level are intended to enable retailers better understand what, when and where customers will make purchases. One consolidated data pool for all customer transactions across channels will support ease-of use and accessibility to the right information. Further, SAP plans to design better access to inventory levels, predictive models and analytics in the application for improved operational management. General availability of SAP Customer Activity Repository is planned for the first quarter of 2014.
