SAP Delivers New Business Value to Lines of Business and Industries With Innovative Solutions Leveraging Power of the SAP HANA® Platform

ORLANDO, Fla. – May 16, 2012 – SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) continues to deliver on its innovation agenda and announced today a new wave of solutions built on the SAP HANA® platform. These real-time solutions aim to help customers drive new business value with advanced reporting, analysis and planning capabilities in the context of their lines of business and industries. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® NOW, being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012.

“SAP’s innovation continues with the delivery of these new applications that are simple to use, easy to implement and are built on an open real-time platform,” said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP Executive Board, Technology Innovation. “These applications take advantage of detailed and fresh data, doing complex analysis on-the-fly to power interactive decision-making on mobile devices and in the cloud.”

The solutions announced today are:

  • SAP® Sales and Operations Planning application
  • SAP® Cash Forecasting analytic application
  • SAP® Planning and Consolidation application
  • SAP® Collections Insight analytic application
  • SAP® Sales Pipeline Analysis analytic content
  • SAP® Bank Analyzer rapid-deployment solution for financial reporting with SAP HANA
  • SAP® Deposits Management rapid-deployment solution for transaction history analysis with SAP HANA
  • SAP® Supplier InfoNet site

Next Generation Planning Applications powered by SAP HANA
SAP Sales and Operations Planning is a cloud-based application powered by SAP HANA and designed to help companies become more demand-driven by enabling them to rapidly translate demand fluctuations into actionable plans for manufacturing, procurement and logistics. With the new application, companies can engage stakeholders from sales, marketing, finance, supply chain and other functions in a truly integrated and collaborative planning process. SAP Sales and Operations Planning brings together the real-time computing power of SAP HANA and the social collaborative paradigm of the SAP® Streamwork® application to enable:

  • Planning, using a unified model of demand, supply chain and financial data, which can be analyzed in real time at any level of granularity or dimension
  • Rapid simulations and scenario comparison on a complete, detailed sales and operations planning model against multiple criteria such as demand fluctuations, product mix changes and capacity constraints
  • Collaboration, using an embedded, context-aware social platform to accelerate planning and decision-making across the company

More details on SAP Sales Operations Planning, Powered by SAP HANA can be found in this video.

“In relatively short period of time, we were able to model a significant portion of our business in the pilot environment and perform what-if scenario analysis,” said Richard Komm, director, Advanced Micro Devices. “We could adjust demand volumes and the capacity resource allocations and immediately see their impact on revenue and margins in the solution. This is something that used to take multiple spreadsheets, numerous emails and phone calls and meetings to develop an aligned plan. We feel that this solution has great potential to improve our sales and operations planning process management and accelerate decision-making and the overall responsiveness of our teams.”

“Today, our sales and operations planning process is largely manual, managed over disconnected spreadsheets, spans multiple internal teams and contract manufacturers, and it takes too much time and effort to respond to demand and supply variations,” said James Smith, director, McKesson. “We were able to assess the impact of fluctuations in capacity positions at contract manufacturers on our sales forecasts in real time, model alternative scenarios and cut our planning cycle time in half. We are excited about the solution and look forward to rolling it out at McKesson.”

SAP Cash Forecasting is an on-premise analytic application built on the SAP HANA platform that helps companies better navigate today’s volatile financial environment by providing advanced capabilities for cash forecasting and analysis in a heterogeneous system landscape. The application is available via an early adoption program. With SAP Cash Forecasting, companies can:

  • Create accurate cash forecasts based on financial data from SAP and non-SAP systems such as ERP
  • Develop an effective foreign exchange hedging strategy based on real-time visibility into exposure across multiple currencies
  • Perform ex-post variance analysis on cash forecasts with the ability to explain variance down to the cash flow statement item-level
  • Manage the forecast process centrally, tracking subsidiaries’ planning status and consolidating forecasts from across the company

“BSH Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH co-innovated with SAP on the new SAP Cash Forecasting analytic application, which is built on the SAP HANA platform,” said Marco Dockweiler, enterprise architect, BSH Bosch und Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH. “This application has the potential to improve cash forecast accuracy and to optimize our processes in the treasury department. The results we have seen are very compelling, and we look forward to our continued collaboration with SAP.”

SAP Planning and Consolidation helps organizations dramatically accelerate their planning processes, giving financial professionals more analytics power and smarter insights, as well as time savings. Powered by SAP HANA, the application enables companies to accelerate budgeting and forecasting by speeding up the retrieval of queries, pull in large data sets and get a real-time view of what’s happening in the business. As a result, people can plan faster, input data back into systems faster and shrink planning cycles, enabling organizations to more quickly respond to capitalize on opportunities or avoid risks. This also provides simplicity for IT as the application is optimized in real-time with SAP HANA.

Empowering Sales and Marketing Users With Real-Time Solutions
SAP Collections Insight provides sales teams with the real-time customer insights they need to optimize their collections strategy and the collaborative tools to execute that strategy. The application is available via an early adoption program. Powered by SAP HANA and accessible via an easy-to-use Web or mobile app, SAP Collections Insight helps companies:

  • Develop rich, dynamic profiles of their customers, including real-time visibility and analysis of payment history and trends
  • Equip users to quickly make and act on collection calls — anytime, anywhere
  • Empower users to collaborate rapidly and effectively to track and resolve collections issues

The capabilities delivered by SAP Collections Insight can enable companies to increase collections yield, accelerate the conversion of revenue to cash and strengthen their customer relationships.

SAP Sales Pipeline Analysis, powered by SAP HANA, helps sales organizations to get instant insights into massive volumes of pipeline data in the SAP® Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application while performing on-the-fly calculations and in-depth analysis on any business dimension. Sales managers can react more quickly to changing sales conditions with real-time information and accelerate deals through the pipeline with powerful and user-driven analytics. As a result, companies can unlock hidden revenue opportunities as well as significantly increase profits and sales effectiveness. To help ensure a quicker time-to-value for customers, the content can be deployed as a rapid-deployment solution with the SAP® rapid-deployment solution for sales pipeline analysis with SAP HANA.

Taking Advantage of “Big Data” in the Banking Industry
SAP Bank Analyzer rapid-deployment solution for financial reporting with SAP HANA is designed to help organizations quickly analyze large volumes of data, enabling them to automate lean banking processes and make decisions in near real time. The solution enables banking organizations rapidly generate detailedfinancial reports on assets and accounting performance, offering immediate answers to their business questions.

SAP Deposits Management rapid-deployment solution for transaction history analysis with SAP HANA helps retail banks boost performance through improved transaction history analysis. It makes it easy for employees to access up-to-date account information, while powerful in-memory data platform and business intelligence (BI) software helps organizations process multi-year information for real-time insights.

Drive Greater Visibility and Stronger Performance Across the Business Network

SAP Supplier InfoNet is an information network that brings together the power of SAP HANA and the cloud to help companies gain real-time insights from ‘big data” and rapidly respond to changing conditions across their multi-tier supply networks. With this solution, companies are able to effectively manage their complex supply chains by:

  • Proactively monitoring and predicting risks across the multi-tier supply network with real-time alerts and leading-edge machine learning and statistical analysis tools
  • Gaining instant insights into the operational health of the supply network by aggregating and analyzing supplier data from enterprise systems and thousands of external data sources
  • Benchmarking supplier performance on quality and delivery and identifying significant shifts and trends in their performance

The capabilities delivered by SAP Supplier InfoNet empower companies to minimize supply chain disruptions before they impact the business, drive stronger performance of their suppliers and save time and operational costs of managing the supplier base.

For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW, visit the Events Newsroom.

SAPPHIRE® NOW
With SAPPHIRE® NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the Events Newsroom at www.events.news-sap.com.

Note to Editors:
Webcasts, announcements, media roundtables, keynote presentations and blog posts from SAPPHIRE NOW will be available in the Events Newsroom at: www.events.news-sap.com. To preview and download broadcast-standard stock footage and press photos digitally, please visit www.sap.com/photos. On this platform, you can find high-resolution material for your media channels. To view video stories on diverse topics, visit www.sap-tv.com. From this site, you can embed videos into your own Web pages, share video via email links and subscribe to RSS feeds from SAP TV. 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 190,000 customers (includes customers from the acquisition of SuccessFactors) to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “expect,” “forecast,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “project,” “predict,” “should” and “will” and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP’s future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), including SAP’s most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

© 2012 by SAP AG. All rights reserved.
SAP and the SAP logo are registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and other countries. Business Objects and the Business Objects logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects Software Ltd. Business Objects is an SAP company. Sybase and the Sybase logo are registered trademarks of Sybase Inc. Sybase is an SAP company. Crossgate is a registered trademark of Crossgate AG in Germany and other countries. Crossgate is an SAP company.

For customers interested in learning more about SAP products:
Global Customer Center: +49 180 534-34-24
United States Only: 1 (800) 872-1SAP (1-800-872-1727)

For more information, press only:
Samantha Finnegan, +1 (650) 276-9350, samantha.finnegan@sap.com, PDT
Cathrin Wolf, +49 6227 7 63908, cathrin.wolf@sap.com, CET
SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EDT; press@sap.com

During SAPPHIRE NOW (from May 14 to 16), to speak with press contacts on site, please dial the SAP press room: +1 (610) 661-0469.

Article source: http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/press-and-media/newsroom/press.epx?PressID=18917

{ 0 comments }

New SAP® Visual Intelligence Software Frees Up Demands on IT, Gives Business Users Extreme Ease-of-Use and Powerful Data Visualization to Find Answers in Existing Information Investments

ORLANDO, Fla. – May 16, 2012 – SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced intuitive software that turns data into answers for people across organizations. SAP® Visual Intelligence software allows employees, departments and lines of business to creatively visualize and analyze information and apply it to individual and group decision-making. A desktop version of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer® software, SAP Visual Intelligence is powered by the SAP HANA® platform and empowers users to perform data discovery regardless of technical skill level. With the new application, business users can take advantage of existing data investments that their IT organizations have built and maintained without tasking IT to produce reports. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® NOW, being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012.

No matter where users sit in a company, they want a way to easily explore, mash up and share information to make better decisions and find new opportunities — without having to task IT to deliver reports. Companies are also looking to maximize existing business intelligence (BI) investments; expanding access allows more people to take advantage of a wealth of existing data and systems to make better-informed decisions.

“The category of visual data discovery has become a must-have component of the BI tool portfolio and SAP has upped its capabilities with its latest product, SAP Visual Intelligence,” said Cindi Howson, founder, BI Scorecard. “Ease of use, time to insight and business agility are key reasons for the rapid growth of visual data discovery that provides users with greater self service with minimal IT support. SAP BusinessObjects Explorer provided ease of use, but the release of SAP Visual Intelligence brings greater flexibility and richer analysis.”

“3M is a diversified company consisting of six different businesses units operating across various industries globally. As a result, we are a data-rich organization that relies on SAP to deliver intuitive BI solutions,” said Jeff Robinson, IT manager, Global Business Intelligence, 3M.  ”SAP Visual Intelligence puts our people in the driver’s seat because they can truly discover data on the fly. And because SAP handles the work of combining multiple data sources backed by in-memory technology, self-service analysis hits our users’ screens in seconds.”

Empowering Users in Any Industry or Line of Business to Explore Data and Find Answers
SAP Visual Intelligence draws upon the company’s expertise in 24 industries, 10 lines of business and global footprint to deliver a product that any company can use to deliver answers to users everywhere. For example:

  • A loan officer at a bank might wonder how the bank is performing regionally across multiple categories of loans and demographics. Typically this would involve intensive efforts downloading and bringing together information from corporate as well as public data sources to find answers, which would be done manually each time a refresh is needed. SAP Visual Intelligence enables the loan officer to create an automated routine to download census information, combine it with regional loan data as well as additional region and state details to enrich the data. The information could be immediately plotted on a map to discover that loan business had increased 25 percent in the past two years for high-income earners in a specific zip code but new loan applications had slowed significantly. At the next meeting, the team could put together a new campaign targeting sales of loans in the high income areas.
  • A regional manager for a healthy snack company might be tasked with increasing sales of a new health bar in the western region. Working with a business analyst and SAP Visual Intelligence, the regional manager could easily access sales numbers for the last three years and combine this with point of sale data to see that the majority of sales were coming from small stores running a new campaign. On the spot, the regional manager and business analyst could expand the campaign to a broader market and eliminate poorly performing campaigns.
  • Responsible for analyzing the numbers of defects across plants and suppliers, a business analyst at a global manufacturing firm could use SAP Visual Intelligence to pull enterprise data as well as external data files sent by suppliers. A mash up of the data might reveal that specific parts and one particular supplier are responsible for 80 percent of the defects. As a result, the engineering team could work with the supplier on correcting the issues.

Fast, Engaging Way of Finding Answers Buried in Massive Amounts of Data
Building on SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, SAP Visual Intelligence leverages SAP HANA to help users ignite their creativity with beautiful and interactive visualizations, allowing them to ask any question without the need for predefined queries, reports or dashboards. SAP Visual Intelligence removes roadblocks to information so business users can find real-time answers on any volume of data. The engaging interface increases the usage of data and ability to derive answers and make better decisions. SAP Visual Intelligence enables ad-hoc discovery everywhere, across all data — from spreadsheets to sales, finance, marketing, customer, social, geo-location, third-party and other business data.

Analytics Innovations Revolutionize the Decision-Making Process
Recognized as the BI market share leader by Gartner, today’s announcement is another of example of SAP’s commitment to investing and expanding its analytics portfolio to respond to the needs of customers and the market. Recently announced SAP® BusinessObjects™ Predictive Analysis software is intended to help users improve decision-making by predicting future outcomes. Additional planned enhancements to SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions aim to deliver more mobile analytics options, richer insight, improved collaborative decision-making and deeper SAP applications integration. The improved capabilities are planned to help companies extract the most business value from the massive amounts of data that are generated today.

“SAP Visual Intelligence revolutionizes decision-making by offering every person in an organization a fast and extremely easy to use way of discovering answers from any data,” said John Schweitzer, senior vice president and general manager, Analytics, SAP. “SAP solutions for analytics empower people with precise information anytime and anywhere using beautiful visualizations, enabling rapid response to events as they unfold. SAP delivers a powerful and comprehensive analytics portfolio that helps companies adapt to constant change so they can achieve remarkable results.”

For more information and demos about SAP Visual Intelligence, visit www.experienceexplorer.com. For a closer look, see: “Screenshots: SAP Broadens Analytics Reach.”

For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW, visit the Events Newsroom.

SAPPHIRE® NOW
With SAPPHIRE® NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe. Being held in Orlando, Florida, May 14-16, 2012, this enhanced, real-time event connects attendees on site with global participants through state-of-the-art broadcast studios and an online experience that incorporates the latest social media and community functionality. Whether on site or online, participants can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. For more information, visit www.sapphirenow.com. Follow SAPPHIRE NOW on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and visit the Events Newsroom at www.events.news-sap.com.

Note to Editors:
Webcasts, announcements, media roundtables, keynote presentations and blog posts from SAPPHIRE NOW will be available in the Events Newsroom at: www.events.news-sap.com. To preview and download broadcast-standard stock footage and press photos digitally, please visit www.sap.com/photos. On this platform, you can find high-resolution material for your media channels. To view video stories on diverse topics, visit www.sap-tv.com. From this site, you can embed videos into your own Web pages, share video via email links and subscribe to RSS feeds from SAP TV. 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 190,000 customers (includes customers from the acquisition of SuccessFactors) to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “expect,” “forecast,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “project,” “predict,” “should” and “will” and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP’s future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), including SAP’s most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

©2012 by SAP AG. All rights reserved.
SAP and the SAP logo are registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and other countries. Business Objects and the Business Objects logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects Software Ltd. Business Objects is an SAP company. Sybase and the Sybase logo are registered trademarks of Sybase Inc. Sybase is an SAP company. Crossgate is a registered trademark of Crossgate AG in Germany and other countries. Crossgate is an SAP company.

For customers interested in learning more about SAP products:
Global Customer Center: +49 180 534-34-24
United States Only: 1 (800) 872-1SAP (1-800-872-1727)

For more information, press only:
Susan Miller, SAP, +1 (610) 661-9225, susan.miller@sap.com, EDT
SAP Press Office, +49 (6227) 7-46315, CET; +1 (610) 661-3200, EDT; press@sap.com
Jeff Shadid, Burson-Marsteller, +1 (214) 224-8419, jeff.shadid@bm.com, CDT

During SAPPHIRE NOW (from May 14 to 16), to speak with press contacts on site, please dial the SAP press room: +1 (610) 661-0469.

Article source: http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/press-and-media/newsroom/press.epx?PressID=18916

{ 0 comments }