SAP Offers Consumer Products Manufacturers Real-Time, End-to-End Trade Volume Visibility and Management with Customer Business Planning

WALLDORF — SAP today announced an expansion to the company’s trade management portfolio, allowing consumer products companies to have unprecedented management of both nonpromoted and promoted product volumes.

By combining planning and execution capabilities for nonpromoted volume with customer business planning along with promoted volume in its trade promotion management solutions, SAP is helping consumer products companies achieve comprehensive, real-time, end-to-end retail and omnichannel account management. The SAP Customer Business Planning application, running on the SAP HANA platform, enables real-time management and execution of total volume when combined with trade promotion management and optimization solutions from SAP.

“Now with a fully comprehensive trade management solution, SAP empowers sales leaders and account managers to act as true general managers on behalf of their retailer and other channel partners,” said E.J. Kenney, senior vice president, Consumer Products Industry Business Unit, SAP. “What’s more, the ability to plan, predict, optimize and execute against all volume provides comprehensive sales inputs into larger enterprise integrated business planning processes. This supports greater transparency and visibility for teams planning and executing on complementary activities and processes, including marketing, supply chain, finance and more.”

SAP collaborated with global consumer products companies to develop SAP Customer Business Planning for use by consumer products companies of all sizes. Based on a co-innovation initiative, Henkel AG & Co. KGaA has cooperated in the development of SAP Customer Business Planning. Within this project the most important needs from Henkel’s business side for sales planning and forecasting have been realized. The involved Henkel experts are convinced that implementing SAP Customer Business Planning brings significant improvement for sales planning processes.

Used with trade promotion management solutions, SAP Customer Business Planning allows for planning of both promoted and nonpromoted volume against overall business targets based on the consumer products company’s own calendar and the retail account’s calendar. It provides forecasts that include actual data for past periods and planning data for future periods. In addition, the application offers account managers real-time visibility into key performance indicators (KPIs) for daily measurement of business performance, target achievement and ROI.

Consumer products companies now have one trade management solution that enables an end-to-end account management process. This includes account planning, promotion planning and funds management, and promotion execution. Because the SAP Customer Business Planning solution is fully integrated with trade promotion management processes and other enterprise planning functions, it will dramatically simplify efforts to manage account and promotion planning, and execution.

According to Dale Hagemeyer, research VP, Gartner, “Solutions for managing trade-promotion-related activities continue to be very topical for CG companies.” Hagemeyer went on to say, “CG companies have realized that they need to improve their ability to look at promotional outcomes to drive more collaboration with retailers, better forecast volume and attempt to reduce overall trade-promotion spending rates.” He further noted that, among other developments, leading solutions are increasingly providing “more functionality around joint business planning, as opposed to merely presenting a promotional plan to the buyer.”*

SAP Customer Business Planning includes standard global processes to enable accelerated rollout and adoption with the flexibility to allow for local processes as needed, which is important for companies adopting the expanded trade management solution.

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Media Contact:

Stacy Ries, +1 (484) 619-0411, stacy.ries@sap.com, ET