SAP Solution BriefSAP for Retail

As the manager of a retail organization – a store, a chain of stores, an Internet entity – you know that your profitability depends to a great extent on successful promotions. But the process of identify-ing, targeting, forecasting, and deploy-ing promotional strategies can be fraught with inefficiencies and imprecision, es-pecially when you are creating multiple versions of promotions to target specif-ic markets or regions. Often, software solutions that support the promotions process create a “siloed” workflow among the executives, merchandisers, advertisers, and others involved in it. This results in extended promotional cy-cles and higher overall process costs.

The SAP® Promotion Management for Retail application changes that by stream lining the entire process for de-livering promotions to customers. It fea-tures processes for promotional event planning, including merchandising-based layouts, and integrates it with modeling and analysis functionality that lets you assess individual offers and overall pro-motions. In one efficient application, you gain the tools you need to generate more effective and profitable targeted promotions within each of your selling channels.

Improved Productivity, Better Decisions

Merchandising groups typically spend an enormous amount of time on tactical issues related to creating promotional advertising collateral. SAP Promotion Management for Retail reduces this time by automating and integrating tactical tasks and supporting the promotional

decision-making process with forecast-ing and analytical tools.

The software also enables your mer-chandisers or their assistants to estab-lish and maintain a database of product information and offers. Information from the database can be plugged into an electronic merchandising layout that is linked to the desktop publishing pro-gram your advertising team uses to cre-ate the final piece of collateral. Imagine it – no more spreadsheets of items and offers, no rekeying of information, no long lead times, no scattered sticky notes on conference tables, no printing and marking up the same proof seven times, and no white boards to identify promotion items. With SAP Promotion Management for Retail, everything is handled via one integrated application that helps you produce relevant promo-tions not just faster but very profitably.

By minimizing tactical tasks, the applica-tion frees you to focus on more strate-gic initiatives for delivering bottom-line benefits to your organization. And by enabling the swift development and exe-cution of promotional plans, it lets you make last-minute changes to your pro-motional schedule and respond quickly to your competitors.

Enhancing the Promotional Planning ProcessSAP Promotion Management for Retail supports full-scope promotional event planning so you can readily manage concurrent promotions in multiple re-gions, price zones, and languages. And its complete marketing-version support for different page counts, themes, and

Achieve bottom-line savings and top-line growth by stream-lining your promotion process with the SAP® Promotion Management for Retail application. The integrated software helps you identify profitable promotions based on shopper demand and gives you the functionality you need to deploy them in a timely manner.

SAP® PROMOTION MANAGEMENT FOR RETAILPLAN, CREATE, AND EXECUTE MORE PROFITABLE PROMOTIONS

top publishing software, SAP Promotion Management for Retail provides direct, dynamic links from the merchandising layouts to desktop publishing functions. This feature enables you to build and update pages automatically – within your advertising department or at an external agency. When changes are made to the merchandising layout, you can set up the SAP software to auto-matically update the desktop publishing file.

You can also associate and display master product data and advertising content – including images of products and product groups – for convenient reuse. The software gives you a full view of all offers in context with a page or area in a graphical layout represen tation.

When you’re ready to execute the promotions at the store level, SAP Promotion Management for Retail sup-ports exporting product, price, and offer information for point-of-sale staging.

languages makes it easier to direct promotions to geographic and demo-graphic markets. This support includes print, in-store displays, temporary price reductions, and electronic tactics by date, ad week, and location. At prod-uct, group, page, and event level, financial roll-ups provide visibility into projected and actual financial results to help ensure your promotions are de-livering the performance you expect.

Automating Workflow to Facilitate Collaboration The SAP application improves your organization’s ability to establish and prepare both print and electronic pro-motions by automating the workflow between advertising and merchandising departments. It supports your efforts

to collaborate and communicate in real time with all contributors. Tasks can be assigned and approved electronically and monitored continuously. Multiple merchandisers can work on the same promotion simultaneously without inter-fering with each other’s work.

Using Proven Models to Forecast Performance Via demand-based forecasting tools, SAP Promotion Management for Retail shows you how individual promotion offers will perform. Intuitive promotion modeling software extrapolates shop-per preferences to forecast future de-mand, revealing the impact of factors such as time of year, price, promotional offer, and the influence of other items being promoted. The software also reveals the impact of consumer-based incentives such as coupons, rebates, store cards, and savings programs on your promotion.

Assessing a Promotion’s Financial ImpactTo support your profitability objectives, the application provides tools for finan-cial analysis and forecasting. These tools minimize time-consuming manual data-gathering and analytical tasks, let you assess the financial impact of your collective promotional decisions accu-rately and objectively, and make the adjustments necessary to meet your goals. You can leverage all-inclusive financial roll-ups by space, page, area, and event, using dynamic calculation of planned versus projected financials to simulate and track event performance. You can also integrate your data into the SAP ERP application, the SAP NetWeaver® Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI) component, or other stand-alone software to tie your results into overall retail operations data.

Executing Promotions Through its tight integration to QuarkXPress or Adobe InDesign desk-

Minimizing tactical tasks frees you to focus on more strate-gic initiatives for delivering bottom-line benefits to your organization.

SAP Promotion Manage-ment for Retail streamlines the entire process for delivering promotions to customers by integrating planning, workflow, and layout functionality with modeling and analytical functionality.

And it integrates with SAP ERP, SAP NetWeaver BI, and non-SAP legacy systems for subsequent promotions settlement.

Assessing Actual PerformanceOnce a promotion has been executed, you want to see how it is performing and confirm that it is meeting your expectations. Robust business intelligence functionality allows you to assess the performance of the promotional campaign. You can create dashboards that focus only on the information you want to see.

The software stores details about the promotion and how it performed, and you can use this information to decide if you want to repeat a promotion or improve upon it in the future. By having

the defined promotions available along-side the results, you can refine your understanding of the promotional lift associated with different promotions to further improve future results. For example, you can determine whether certain products behave particularly well when featured on the front page of a weekly flier or whether you are

wasting prime end-of-aisle display space on items that will be strong sellers anyway if you just drop the price on them.

Bottom-Line Savings and Top-Line Growth

SAP Promotion Management for Retail helps you create more effective promo-tions by injecting an understanding of shopper demand into the process. And it lets you define and execute promo-tions more efficiently by facilitating collaboration between advertising and merchandising departments. These ad-vantages help ensure that you identify the right promotions to run, that you do so in a timely manner, and – most importantly – that what you decide on is actually what is executed.

In sum, SAP Promotion Management for Retail offers you the following benefits:• Improved productivity – supporting

better collaboration among market-ing, merchandising, and advertising execution groups; streamlining pro-motions through fewer cycles; and using resources more efficiently

• Greater promotional effectiveness – enabling the creation of relevant, timely, and targeted advertising (by product, category, and zone) via au-tomated ad-versioning functionality

• More accurate product- and store-level forecasts – helping you under-stand the financial performance of each promotional event before making final decisions

• Lower promotional costs – reducing the time required to produce adver-tisements as well as the number of proofs you need to print and review

The SAP Advantage

SAP Promotion Management for Retail is just one of many valuable offerings available in the SAP for Retail solution portfolio. Because the offerings are modular in structure, you can deploy the functionality you need as you need it. Preloaded templates allow you to start using and adapting some func-tions immediately to drive company-wide best business practices.

A global team of experts facilitates im-plementation, knowledge transfer, and user training on all portfolio solutions. And ongoing SAP research and devel-opment ensures that the SAP software solutions offered to the retail market improve continually in response to cus-tomer requests and retail trends.

For More InformationTo find out more about the solutions available in SAP for Retail and learn how your organization can streamline its promotions process with SAP Promotion Management for Retail, call your SAP representative today or con-tact us at www.sap.com/retail.

The software improves efficiency by providing the tools you need to generate more effec-tive and profitable targeted promotions within each of your selling channels.

The software supports the swift development and execution of promotional plans so you can make the last-minute changes to your promotional schedule that let you respond quickly to your competitors.

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Summary With the SAP® Promotion Management for Retail application, those involved with planning, creating, and executing your promotions can collaborate more efficiently and develop more effective and profitable promotions. The software empowers your merchandising managers with better decision-making tools and liberates your advertising staff with improved productivity tools that reduce the promotions timeline.

Business Challenges • Produce targeted promotions that feature products and pricing for specific markets or

regions• Publish multiple versions of promotions • Identify the most profitable promotions to offer

Supported Business Processes and Services• Planning and collaboration – Plan and collaborate on the creation of multiple promotional

campaigns, using automated workflows to stay on schedule • Promotion modeling – Determine your promotional mix while facilitating collaboration be-

tween merchandising and advertising departments • Version management – Manage multiple versions of promotional products, offering types

and prices by location group or event location• Promotional demand forecasting – Forecast the demand for a product in a promotion by

location or location group depending on price, offer type, and space• Space allocation – Support layout and space decisions through visualization and demand

forecasts• Financial analysis – Determine the financial impact of promotional decisions using

demand forecasts • Promotion creation – Create and maintain a database of offers and plug them into an

electronic merchandising layout that is linked to desktop publishing software

Business Benefi ts • Improved productivity through better collaboration and more efficient use of resources• Greater promotional effectiveness by creating more relevant, timely, and targeted

advertising through automated ad-versioning functionality • More accurate product- and store-level forecasting to improve decisions• Lower costs and reduction of time needed to produce advertisements, thanks to

streamlined processes

For More InformationCall your SAP representative or visit us online at www.sap.com/retail.