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With the announcement of SAP 360 Customer, SAP has just taken CRM to the next level. Market challengers and business innovators are aggressively gaining ground by taking structured and unstructured data to improve sales and service revenues like never before.

Now, with SAP 360 Customer, SAP supports this approach by incorporating SAP HANA—the in-memory computing and analytics technology innovation that has changed the speed at which organizations can comprehend business data - to drive those complex scenarios and decision making processes.

Before SAP 360 Customer, most of the technical capabilities and ingredients were there for us to use, but without a comprehensive solution, it was a full time job keeping track of the different systems and reports involved in managing plans and understanding our customers and consumers.

And, honestly, was it always worth it? Today, it most certainly is when you’re considering the expected ROI from an "integrated" CRM solution and exercising SAP CRM best practices that come with the SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions packages.



But, overall, there was an important puzzle piece missing. We had transactional systems. We had data warehouses and analytical capabilities. We had social media reports about customer reactions to our products. The overarching question for CRM managers was: How was it all integrated into transactional processes?  That is where SAP HANA comes in, by really taking all that data and making it available for business processes. In real-time.

I believe that there is another key question: How does the SAP 360 Customer concept apply to your own personal situation and your very specific journey towards customer excellence?

From there, you might ask:

  • Where do I start?
  • And how do I grow towards a complete vision that fit my exact needs?


Clearly, adopting SAP HANA can be a key component, but by itself,  it will not provide out of the box answers to your CRM initiative. Granted, it is a game-changing technology. However, it needs to be embedded into a “solution.” That solution then leverages the power of SAP HANA’s in-memory computing capabilities to help you derive real business benefits, offering meaningful and impactful scenarios addressing real business problems.

This is where SAP Rapid Deployment solutions come into the picture. As many of you will know, rapid-deployment solutions are a combination of SAP software with the services it takes to implement best-practice scenarios and the assets to make those services go as smoothly as possible. In a sense, rapid-deployment solutions make SAP software come to life with business value.

In one package, you get everything you need to be up and running in weeks– including preconfigured software and implementation services developed by experts. With a defined scope and predictable cost, you gain the benefits without any surprises. Plus, you can expand your solution as your business processes change and your needs grow.


The potential benefits?

  • SAP best practices contained in your rapid-deployment solution.
  • Proven deployment methodology, tested and documented, so your solution deploys quickly and easily with preconfigured software, content and enablement.
  • Address your most pressing business needs today while laying the foundation for future expansion.
  • Choose from different deployment, hosting and financing options.

So to come back to the earlier question, where do you start?

There is more than one answer to this, depending on your unique needs. Are you already leveraging SAP CRM for your Sales, Service and Marketing processes? Are you looking to leverage SAP HANA for performance or analytics? Both? You can. The most practical and cost-effective way is to take one or more of the 360 Customer rapid-deployment packages and take it live in a matter of weeks so that you can start getting real benefits from SAP CRM expertise as soon as possible, and evolve your system, later if you find you need additional features or functionality enabled.

For example, if you want to dive in head first and go with CRM on SAP HANA right away, you can. With the launch of CRM on SAP HANA there is a rapid-deployment solution available that helps you implement quickly and affordably. With the same basic scope of the popular SAP CRM rapid-deployment solution package, covering Sales, Service and Marketing scenarios.

From there, how do you grow towards the complete vision?

If you have read my previous blog, ‘Riding the CRM tiger. Without pulling its teeth’, you know that the SAP Rapid Deployment solution portfolio is designed to help you harness the power of all of SAP’s different solutions to make them work for you.

Continue with Social Media Intelligence? We have a HANA based rapid-deployment solution to allow you to extract data from Facebook, Twitter and other unstructured data sources and analyze it based on natural language processing capabilities – SAP HANA Sentiment Intelligence rapid-deployment solution.


Want to take your sales data on the road with you on your iPad? We have SAP Mobile Sales rapid-deployment solution.

Do you have lots of customer data to sift through when targeting your marketing campaigns?  There is the HANA based rapid-deployment solution for Customer Segmentation.

I will stop here, but you get the idea (to see the other available SAP CRM rapid-deployment solutions on SAP.com, click here). All major aspects of SAP 360 Customer are supported by rapid-deployment solutions. There are many ways to accomplish SAP 360 Customer and just as many roads to your ultimate CRM vision.

This is not only a time of great product innovation at SAP but also a time of disruptive change of how those products are consumed. And we are not done yet. Watch this space for details in the coming weeks…

For more blogs about SAP CRM rapid-deployment solutions, see below:

Follow SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions on Twitter: @SAPRDS