Valuable new post by my colleague Andy Greig
The pressure to evolve is persistent and enormous for consumer products companies. It’s no longer enough to deliver new products that will fly off store shelves. The shopping experience must also be highly personalized, convenient, and fast – reaching across a range of channels as consumers jump between screens and brick-and-mortar storefronts.
To deliver experiences that wow consumers, consumer products companies are tracking consumers’ online activities and generating customized, data-driven insights into the movements of the economy, buying behavior, and product demand. However, timely access to this intelligence is still elusive for most industry players.
Because maintaining a data center that efficiently captures every piece of information is a significant drain on time and money, the cloud is now viewed as a secure, reliable method for collecting and accessing huge volumes of insights in real time. But first, businesses must acquire internal resources and expertise to migrate and operate in the cloud in a manner that helps control costs and manage risks proactively.
Finding competitive innovation and ease in the cloud
According to IDC, approximately 90% of the industry’s total growth over the next 10 years will belong to companies that successfully engage with consumers directly. While most consumer products companies may interpret this prediction as a call to direct-to-consumer selling that is omnichannel and persuasive, the real need is to access data from every business area to identify consumer needs, industry-disruptive opportunities, and risks as soon as they emerge.
With a potent blend of mobile, analytics, and commerce technology, an
enterprise cloud platform powered by
in-memory computing technology can help companies deconstruct their data and reassemble it in more ways than ever before. This approach not only generates more informed insight, but it also creates a foundation for new business models and processes that serve consumers better than any rival.
This coordinated landscape of applications and complementary managed services can accelerate the deployment of innovations to enable three key success factors:
•Real-time, personalized, and responsive engagement: Engage consumers directly by customizing every interaction, fulfill demand immediately with hyperlocal supply networks, and optimize the capacity of hyperconnected manufacturing.
•Frictionless business networks: Integrate partners and suppliers with the core business to compete as a single ecosystem, transform products into services, and take advantage of real-time knowledge.
•High-value innovation and growth: Increase productivity by exponentially improving business intelligence and empowering employees to help control costs, reduce risk, and deliver business outcomes.
Creating a foundation for doing things differently, not just better
In our increasingly digital economy, consumers have firm control over the success of consumer products brands. With multiple devices on hand, they have access to information about everything – from trend and product availability to pricing and business practices. Companies can take advantage of these moments to make sense of consumer behavior and allow the entire value network to act proactively in a manner that best benefits the brand.
For the consumer products industry, the cloud is a new frontier of growth and development. And as companies reimagine their entire business, the right cloud platform can provide both stability and long-term reliability for the core enterprise processes, as well as the flexibility to address changes happening on a constant basis.
Unlock the full value of your data with SAP S/4HANA and SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. Read the brief “
Drive Innovation and Reduce Complexity with SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud for Consumer Products Companie...” and visit our
curated library of resources.
