SAP SE is well known for providing enterprise software for running multiple operations of big corporations, but it’s striving to put a fresh face on how it’s offering new digital products to help companies of all sizes compete with digital technology for marketing, selling and managing inventory.
The new digital offerings from SAP include SAP Anywhere, which provides e-commerce, inventory management and customer website analytics applications in a single software suite.
SAP Anywhere became commercially available last year to companies in China, primarily retailers. SAP rolled it out this spring to companies in the United Kingdom and the United States, markets where it’s targeting more wholesalers than retailers. Its early users include handbag and accessories designer, manufacturer and wholesaler Mad Rabbit Kicking Tiger, or M.R.K.T., a China-based company that supplies handbags designed with felt materials and sold through its MRKTStore.com; and baseball celebrity Reggie Jackson, who deployed SAP Anywhere technology to operate his ReggiesGarage.com, where he connects buyers of parts for vintage cars with suppliers. Adrienne Fong, operations manager of M.R.K.T., and Jackson both appeared last month at the annual SAP Sapphire users conference in Orlando, Fla., to talk about their e-commerce operations.
They each said they chose SAP Anywhere—which SAP built on Java technology and offers under a software-as-a-service model—for its ease of deployment and use, and the scope of functionality and data it provides for managing sales and inventory. The SAP Anywhere suite includes software for a customer-facing e-commerce site, mobile point-of-sale system for in-store sales, order management, supply chain management, inventory management, and web analytics for monitoring and analyzing data on customer activity across both e-commerce and in-store sales.
Software-as-a-service, or SaaS, lets users access through a web browser software that a vendor hosts on the Internet. Pricing for SAP Anywhere ranges from $549 to $1,869 per month, plus a one-time set-up fee ranging from $1,098 to $3,3738, based on such criteria as data storage volume and number of websites.
M.R.K.T., which is based in Shanghai and operates a U.S. office in Los Angeles, used SAP Anywhere to launched a retail e-commerce site in China last year on SAP Anywhere and is now developing wholesale sites for business customers outside of China. Through a single SAP Anywhere software suite, Fong said in an interview, M.R.K.T. will sell its products to wholesale customers while also placing its own online orders to suppliers of felt and other materials for producing its handbags. For now, M.R.K.T. usually emails Excel spreadsheets to suppliers to process orders.
Fong didn’t specify how M.R.K.T. would use SAP Anywhere technology to connect online with its suppliers, but a spokesman for SAP said a typical set-up would integrate SAP Anywhere’s order management and supply chain software with an online business network of suppliers, such as the SAP Ariba Network.
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