INNOVATIONS 2010: EXCITING NEW CAPABILITIES FROM SAP

Position your company for a return to economic growth through standardisation, consolidation, transparency, and simplicity. Focus investments to conserve cash, cut costs, and improve core business processes today – with a lasting, positive impact of a leaner, more flexible enterprise. For example, Innovations 2010 can help you benefit from managing a leaner enterprise in these areas:

• Finance – Master data governance helps track and document changes to ensure compliance.
• Finance, human resources, operations, IT – A shared services framework helps you reduce costs by centralising administrative functions, distribute best practices more quickly, and reduce IT costs.
• Human resources – Streamlined compensation planning enables you to reward – and keep – top talent.
• Manufacturing – Implementation of lean manufacturing planning and execution reduces costs associated with excess inventory, labor, and poor quality.
• Marketing – Enhancements to disbursement of marketing funds help you gain a better hold on marketing spend.
• Procurement – Services procurement enhancements help you effectively manage and reduce the overall costs of third-party services.
• Product development – Guided transitions of engineering product structures to manufacturing production processes help reduce ramp-up time and change cycles for faster time to profit.
• Supply chain – Planning of third-party orders includes taking into account forecasts, transportation time, and finite capacities at the supplier.

Your company can no longer operate in isolation. Cultivate your business-to-business network, and leverage the power of that network to stabilise your business in the economic recovery, while serving your collective customers more cost effectively. You can then adapt to the increasing speed of change, talent shortages, and demands of consumers for mass customisation – positioning your business for a return to growth.

For example, you can survive and thrive by responding with solutions for networked customer service, procurement, supply chain and multi-location manufacturing. Here are just some ways that Innovations 2010 can help you transform these areas into business models for growth:

• Enterprise services – Leverage extensible business processes with advanced integration and orchestration capabilities.
• Finance, telecommunications, and utilities – Provide convergent charging, rating, and invoicing, which helps improves monetisation of new products and services and streamlines invoice collections.
• Manufacturing – Integrate and coordinate processes with outsourced manufacturing partners.
• Marketing and retail – Provide collaborative management and loyalty management for indirect selling partners.
• Procurement – Increase supplier collaboration and management leading to increased visibility and decreased overall costs.
• Supply chain – Improve outsourced manufacturing processes to increase end-user productivity and visibility into supply chain dependencies and disruptions.

Understanding your business operations comprehensively is critical to making sound decisions to drive your business forward – based on real-time, relevant business insight for today and the future. Insight matters most for what you need to deal with right now. In a recovering economy, decisions have greater consequences for your business operations and viability.

For example, you can no longer afford to guess about the performance of your assets – people, customers, products, and services. How you use and leverage resources becomes critical in terms of cost and environmental impact. You can deliver more predictable results with business insights that anticipate new directions, optimise decisions for financial and operating assets, and maximize revenue from both new and existing customers. SAP Innovations 2010 can help you optimise business growth and profits in these areas:

• Asset management and maintenance – Benefit from unified asset performance management functionality across the plant and enterprise.
• Finance – Gain closed-loop, financial-performance data, cost, and profit analyses, as well as profit-center management functions.
• Product development – Get insightful product data on price, quality, orders or carbon footprint.
• Supply chain – Improve transparency within your collaborative supply chain processes.