A consistent business driver that emerges across multiple SAPinsider research reports, including our most recent research, Supply Chain Planning in The Cloud, is the developing customer expectations and developing customer demand. As the business world becomes more and customer-centric, there is an increasing need to leverage data and analytics to transform the customer experience. Organizations need to build the essential capability to integrate all customer data siloed across various systems and modules into one view or platform. This capability merges the overall customer interaction and experience journey and provides a holistic view of enhancing customer experience. Unified commerce pertains to building this view. The ability helps clients build customer journeys that enhance customer experience, leveraging a single, interesting brand story and allowing organizations to improve their customer brand continuously.
Understanding Unified Commerce
As discussed earlier, an organization needs to build a critical capability to integrate all customer data siloed across various systems and modules into one view or platform. As technology capabilities increased exponentially and organizations embarked rapidly on their digital transformation journeys, organizations invested in many point systems to straddle channel engagement, bolting them onto their existing workflow. Even when they have a best-of-breed ERP system, the customer touchpoint or journey data is spread or fragmented across modules.
This disjointed view led to an unsatisfactory consumer experience because correct, current customer insights, basket data, and expectations remain isolated within siloed applications or ERP modules. It unified the answer to this complexity of fragmentation commerce- the capability organizations need to build to integrate all customer data siloed across various systems and modules into one view or platform. This merges the overall customer interaction and experience journey and provides the holistic view needed to enhance customer experience. Unified commerce is frequently confused with omnichannel, but they differ in many aspects. While omnichannel customer engagement allows companies to interact with customers across various channels, it still keeps the drawback of leveraging a set of distinct tools. In most setups, specific customer groups and consumers are targeted through separate channels. Hence, each channel has separate databases, ERP and CRM tools, communications protocols, and other technologies.
Relevance in SAP Technology Landscape
To understand this, let us use an example of OMS+, a unified commerce solution from SAP partner DataXstream. DataXstream OMS+ for SAP was developed with the intent to offer a high-performance, customer-centric application that is flexible and can be tailored to each customer’s unique business requirements. It is built using native HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, leveraging SAP Gateway to interact directly with SAP applications. The solution utilizes dynamic design allowing the user interface to be deployed to any web-enabled device. They implement it via SAP’s HANA Cloud platform making OMS+ a true cloud-based application. SAP is a best-of-breed ERP system; hence, SAP customers can gain enterprise-wide data access by leveraging its core ERP functionality that integrates various modules. DataXstream aims to help companies address their challenges, the key challenge being the ability to successfully integrate a plethora of technologies to serve customers across channels.
DataXstream’s OMS+ solution is a unified commerce solution designed to serve as one unified solution across all channels. The solution enables business processes like order processing, inventory management, and distribution functionality through direct OMS+ interaction with the SAP live digital core. The solution was initially designed and built much before SAP S/4 HANA was available; hence, it can also bolt to existing SAP ECC technology. The solution has developed with time and now bolts seamlessly with SAP S/4 HANA. When combined with SAP S/4 HANA, the solution significantly enhances the capability of managing massive amounts of data and analytics on all aspects of business performance in real-time without affecting transactional performance for end-users.
What Does This Mean for SAPinsiders?
As the business world becomes more and customer-centric, there is an increasing need to leverage data and analytics to transform the customer experience. An organization needs to build a key capability to integrate all customer data siloed across various systems and modules into one view or platform. Unified commerce merges the overall customer interaction and experience journey and provides the holistic view needed to enhance customer experience. However, building this capability requires that SAPinsiders are cognizant of certain aspects:
Plan the implementation carefully. While the implementation aspect of these solutions may not be as intricate as implementing an end-to-end ERP system, the entire initiative needs to be planned carefully to ensure seamless integration with SAP and leverage the full value from the desired customer data visibility. Scott also emphasized this: “When you're trying to get to a unified commerce state, and looking at the tools to do as an SAP customer, you need to treat these projects very much like an SAP implementation project.”
Understand your unique pain points. Before jumping into building this capability, try to understand why you need to have this capability. This will help you unearth the aspects of your pain points, help you understand the specific customer stories you want to understand, and help you plan your implementations better. As Scott suggested: “We need to take a hard look at some of our business processes and see if there's room for improvement there. We need to figure out what our pain points are and figure out the best way to use the solution in a way that's going to help us eliminate these pain points.”
Research available solutions prudently. Understand the solutions available in the market and evaluate them through the lens of your unique requirements. Collaborate and interact with vendors to get a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of their products. You need to ask the right questions when making these decisions. A couple of examples that Scott highlighted were: “Is this tool going to help our users do their job more efficiently? Does it integrate seamlessly with SAP solutions?”
