SAP Releases Customer Activity Repository
SAP today released the SAP Customer Activity Repository application, a retail data repository powered by the SAP HANA in-memory computing platform.
SAP Customer Activity Repository is intended to help retailers become more customer-centric by bringing together customer, sales, and inventory information from siloed applications. It aims to empower retailers with consumer insights by consolidating customer interactions from stores, online, and mobile channels with insight from social media feedback, such as Twitter or Facebook posts, to help retailers optimize branding, marketing, promotions, pricing, merchandising, inventory management processes, and more.
Features such as real-time visibility into consumer sales data down to the transaction level are intended to enable retailers better understand what, when, and where customers will make purchases.
Further, SAP plans to design better access to inventory levels, predictive models, and analytics in the application for improved operational management.
SAP HANA helps businesses through real-time analysis and reporting combined with dramatically accelerated business processes. As the backbone of SAP Customer Activity Repository, it is intended to deliver lightning-fast insight at a user-determined level of detail, helping eliminate the time needed to handle multiple data transactions in the point-of-sale (POS) transaction log, other sales channels, and reporting systems.
"As consumers expand their shopping experiences across multiple purchase channels, retailers have an opportunity to engage more fully and provide more personal interactions," said Lori Mitchell-Keller, global head of the Retail Industry Business Unit at SAP, in a statement. "This is a daunting task, requiring access to multiple databases and tools. With SAP Customer Activity Repository, retailers will have access to powerful consumer insights, be able to centralize critical business data, run reports instantly, and make better business decisions that support both sales and the customer experience."
General availability of SAP Customer Activity Repository is planned for early next year.