April 6, 2016
By Sam Del Rowe, contributing writer

SAP Data Maintenance and SAP Hybris Commerce Offer New Integration

Vistex, a provider of solutions for managing pricing, rebate, and royalty programs, today announced an integration of SAP Data Maintenance for ERP by Vistex with SAP Hybris Commerce. SAP Data Maintenance brings new pricing capabilities to SAP Hybris Commerce, with the aim of helping online marketers improve their promotional and pricing flexibility, utilize complex promotional scenarios, and increase sales and revenue-per-order.

"[The joint solution] takes the power of the Vistex promotion engine and the usability and the customer experience of the Hybris Commerce tool and marries them really nicely without having to do any custom work to get things to work," says Cara DeGraff, vice president of product management at Vistex. "The Hybris engine is your e-commerce engine, [and] what the Vistex engine does is it gives you the ability to promote your products and price your products in ways that are going to allow you to help sell," she adds.

SAP Data Maintenance employs software workbench tools to assist in the management of product, pricing, and vendor master data. The solution aims to assist nontechnical users in maintaining master data without needing to rely on IT support. SAP Data Maintenance also provides support for price administration, price execution, and deal management.

SAP Hybris Commerce is equipped with both B2B and B2C commerce applications, and provides product content, Web content, and order management capabilities. The solution is designed to deliver a consistent customer experiences across all channels and provides a real-time remarketing engine that tracks customer behavior and delivers in-the-moment messages when online shoppers abandon their carts.

SAP Data Maintenance adds promotion planning, profitability simulations, true margin analysis, and gross-to-net calculation to SAP Hybris Commerce's capabilities, and the two solutions supply users with a number of real-time capabilities. First, the joint solution can determine promotion eligibility using customer information such as location and order type. Second, it can create discounts, as well as discount future orders when a customer spends a predetermined amount. Third, it can present customers with available promotions as they browse catalogs or place items in their cart. Fourth, it can display relevant benefits for purchases such as applied promotions, missed promotions, and benefits earned. Finally, it can determine pricing and deal eligibility in real time as customers update their shopping carts.

"As a consumer, and as a company, you want to be able to go in and know what is it, truly, that I'm going to pay and what's available to me, and if I use this promotion what's going to happen versus if I use a different promotion—which one's going to be better for me. To be able to simulate that and to have all of that information at your fingertips is what's critical these days," DeGraff says.