ARMONK, N.Y. and WALLDORF,
Germany, Aug. 24, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and
SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) have teamed up to provide a co-innovated
solution for the retail and consumer packaged goods industries to
help both increase profitability and improve the consumer
experience.
The solution uses near real-time data to markedly improve
planning and execution in the physical store. Unique data sources,
such as IBM's Metro Pulse, flow through SAP® Cloud Platform to
provide insights that can be acted upon almost immediately. All of
these transformative insights for better decision making are fueled
by live business, unique near real-time market-demand signals and a
digital core that helps make the execution possible.
This is the first plan for an industry focused solution
resulting from the two companies' digital transformation
partnership announced last year. It is one of several
industry-specific digital solutions currently in development. It
also expands upon the investment IBM has made in retail and
consumer packaged goods customers with SAP S/4HANA industry
solutions. The two companies also intend to collaborate on SAP
Model Company services, a prepackaged, ready-to-use, end-to-end
reference solution that can be customized to meet specific
line-of-business and industry needs to accelerate the time to
value.
IBM Metro Pulse uses IBM's cognitive services to provide
hyperlocal insights around weather, events, traffic and
demographics and helps address key industry challenges such as
on-shelf availability and demand forecasting accuracy. During
trials of this cognitive technology across more than 100 stores in
multiple American markets, the solution improved forecasting
accuracy of volatile, hard-to-forecast products by 75 percent.
SAP's expertise will bring together the various unique data
sources, including IBM's cognitive capabilities, on SAP Cloud
Platform, allowing retailers to identify and take near-immediate
action on these new insights to help improve business
performance.
For example, a New York City
sales operation manager for a beverage company may try to forecast
sales during the New York Marathon at one of her team's stores
along the running route. Using this new solution, she could
incorporate information on traffic flows at different points along
the route, as well as the impact the weather forecast has on
demand. This allows her to predict with much greater accuracy the
spikes in demand at a store level. Based on these insights,
the sales operation manager can create tasks and suggested orders
for sales representatives, who in turn can discuss with each
individual store manager how to make the appropriate product
adjustments expected to maximize incremental sales for both
parties.
"SAP S/4HANA, coupled with access to rich, hyperlocal data
understood and reasoned by IBM's cognitive services, can provide
consumer product and retail business users across the C-suite with
the specific insights to gain a competitive advantage in major
markets," said Laurence Haziot, IBM Global Managing Director and
General Manager Consumer Industries.
"Through this exciting collaboration between SAP and IBM,
retailers and consumer products companies today can respond with
speed, precision and confidence to locally relevant events. SAP
S/4HANA includes capabilities to enable users to execute end-to-end
business processes in ways that other systems cannot," said
Lori Mitchell-Keller, global general
manager, Consumer Industries at SAP.
For more information about IBM's work in the consumer products
industry, please visit:
www-935.ibm.com/industries/consumerproducts/. Follow IBM Industries
on Twitter at @IBMIndustries.
About IBM Global Business Services:
For more
information about IBM Global Business services, please visit:
www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/consulting/. Follow IBM GBS on
Twitter at @IBM_Consulting.
For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on
Twitter at @sapnews.
About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application
software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and
industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to
storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and
organizations to work together more efficiently and use business
insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP
applications and services enable more than 355,000 business and
public sector customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously,
and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.
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SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC.
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SOURCE IBM