Introduction
2024 is the breaking year where world wide economic is entering in new phase. Growth decreases, some ressources limits are reached (and more are coming), and population is aging.
How those facts will be translated in IT and eCommerce ? How business can be made in this context ?
This article is a proposition to answer those questions or at least to see new trends coming.
Growth
Less volume is often synonym to less profit. And less profit forces us to find a way to optimise or to re-think how we do business.
A simple and short term answer is to increase price to compensate volumes reduction sold. Under specific circonstance, It what we saw with global inflation in 2023. But higher price is an accelerator of economic shrinking. And it is an endless deadly loop.
Other solution is to embrace this volume selling reduction by reviewing your internal business process. This can be executed by simplifying how business has been made and be more flexible to volume selling fluctuation.
For your SAP Commerce solution, it can be translated by seeking how business can be run in standard features. Less customization allows you to adopte sooner the new roadmap features/optimized releases and be less depends on expensive IT internal expert division.
Let take a concrete example, SAP Commerce introduces Adaptive Search which a way to personalize the search result by user group/segment. If your IT division did a deep customization in search engine, it becomes harder to plug this standard feature. And then, by frustration, you might be tempted by integrating a external search engine to get this capacity.
Deviate from standard, in economic context where profit can fluctuate a lot, could not be a good idea.
Aging
Population is aging. And with that, classic eCommerce journey is changing. People is seeking quality and simplification. Fancy promotion banner, complex user journey, long response time, and popup screens everywhere are probably the best way to lose your users.
Aging population needs to be consolidated in smooth and standardized interface. And SAP Commerce provides a simple, fast and clean interface with Composable Storefront module / B2C demo website.
In short, your internal business complexity should be hidden as much as possible to your end user. For example, this can be achieved by doing some comprises regarding how stocks and prices are handled internally.
Resource limitation
Resource limitation means that hardware will become more and more expensive. And software optimization should be sought after in order to keep running your business.
Physical resource exhaustion is not the only motivation factor here, we will have also more and more sustainable objectives to respect. Your business must be less impacting or more green.
This point is echoing to the simplification and standardisation. Less complexity is easer to compute and to scale.
Infrastructure rationalisation usage is also a great opportunity to optimisation your solution. And it can be done through : data cleaning, CPU usage reduction, Memory usage reduction, sizing allocated assessment, nominal/peak period analysis, and so on.
Conclusion
By his global position, SAP is known better than other company how this economic change can be handled. Our solutions take these factors into account to anticipate needs while including the optimizations necessary for the proper execution of complex business rules.
SAP Expert Services can help you taking the right decision for your business and to assist you for maintaining in good shape your current SAP solution.
