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SAP Announces Third Wave of On-Demand CRM
TMCnet Contributing Editor
German CRM vendor SAP (News - Alert) AG has announced the availability of the third wave of its SAP CRM on-demand products, hitting the product target set in February.
With the new SAP Service on-demand, service managers can consolidate and track service tickets, establish rule- based escalations for follow-up and "better adhere to service-level agreements."
SAP also introduced capabilities for the existing SAP CRM on-demand products, including new sales automation features for product and quotation management. The new customer service capabilities in the SAP Service on-demand product include:
Service Ticket Management. This allows service agents to manage customer service tickets comprehensively and comply with service-level agreements. It enables multi-level categorization, rule-based service-level determination and due-date calculation, as well as rule-based service ticket distribution to service teams.
Rule-Based Service Ticket Distribution. This enables service ticket distribution based on priority, status, product and account type.
Service Level Monitoring. This helps agents specify the business time frame of service availability to track and improve compliance with service level agreements.
In July SAP announced it was acquiring the new e-commerce and CRM capabilities through its acquisition of Praxis Software Solutions, a privately-held software company and long-term SAP Business One partner based in Minneapolis. The purchase gave SAP the technology and Praxis employees to throw at the SAP Business One operations.
Addressing increasing demand among SMEs to make e-commerce and CRM core parts of their businesses, SAP officials describe the new features as a way to provide a unified view of information across sales, financials, manufacturing, reporting and customer-facing activities in a single software product.
SAP officials of course are aware that e-commerce and Web-based CRM are among the largest growth areas in business software for SMEs worldwide.
Praxis offers e-commerce and Web-based CRM through NetPoint Commerce, an e-commerce package designed for SMEs that want to sell and market online. It also has NetPoint Focus, a new online CRM package which can be used to extend the reach of SAP Business One CRM functionality using a Web-based user interface.
While both products are currently available as product extensions wherever SAP Business One is sold, they will be integrated into its core development and offered with it going forward, said Gadi Shamia, senior vice president, Solution Management, Small Business Solutions, SAP said in July.
SAP is also introducing improvements to the SAP Sales on-demand product, including product support, which allows detailed product information to be uploaded from and integrated directly into mySAP ERP, enabling product definitions and attributes to be easily accessed and leveraged in all facets of sales, marketing and service processes.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.
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