SAP C/4HANA has been tak­ing cen­ter stage in the SAP world late­ly. As you may have heard, this is SAP’s attempt to gain ground in the cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment (CRM) mar­ket by fill­ing the func­tion­al­i­ty gap with­in the end-to-end, dig­i­tal­ly empow­ered intel­li­gent enter­prise. There hasn’t been a lot of detail released yet on the specifics of SAP C/4HANA. So we’ve been work­ing to demys­ti­fy it, as we did in our arti­cle on what to expect from SAP C/4HANA. Here are a few more things about SAP’s lat­est push into the CRM space that you should know.

Con­nect­ing the Enter­prise Front End to the Back End

Though his­tor­i­cal­ly SAP has tak­en a strong role in run­ning the back-end process­es or ​“cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem” of a busi­ness, SAP believes it offers high-qual­i­ty front-end appli­ca­tions too. Most of these front-end needs relate to how a cus­tomer inter­acts with the busi­ness on the tech­nol­o­gy side, so cus­tomer expe­ri­ence has become a recent focal point. Where SAP S/4HANA is meant to solid­i­fy how data and ana­lyt­ics can move through a company’s var­i­ous work­loads, SAP C/4HANA offers a path­way from the first touch­point of this data as it comes in from customers.

Same Tech­nolo­gies, Dif­fer­ent Cloud Names

Busi­ness­es that have already invest­ed in SAP Hybris or have car­ried over their accounts from pre­vi­ous con­nec­tions with Cal­lidus­Cloud and Gigya may have noticed that these brands are no longer front and cen­ter. This is because SAP has retired the Hybris and Cal­lidus names and has shift­ed Gigya to a sup­port­ing role, rather than as a star of its process. In their places, SAP has rebrand­ed its series of enter­prise clouds to align with the process­es or busi­ness func­tions they serve, and they’ve all been rolled under the umbrel­la SAP is now call­ing SAP Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence.

Instead of Hybris, SAP now offers both the SAP Mar­ket­ing Cloud and the SAP Com­merce Cloud. Rather than Cal­lidus­Cloud, SAP is call­ing this tech­nol­o­gy the SAP Sales Cloud. SAP’s Cloud for Ser­vice takes a slight detour and is now the SAP Ser­vice Cloud, while Gigya’s tech­nol­o­gy appears in the SAP Cus­tomer Data Cloud from Gigya.

What does this mean for cus­tomers? Not much, except that SAP has hope­ful­ly reduced some con­fu­sion about what each of these prod­ucts does.

What Doesn’t Fit Into SAP C/4HANA?

SAP C/4HANA is built on a lead-to-cash approach, so it inte­grates many of the work­loads SAP his­tor­i­cal­ly has served, includ­ing e‑commerce and sales. Inter­est­ing­ly, SAP Ari­ba may be sup­port­ed indi­rect­ly, but it’s not con­sid­ered part of SAP’s CRM offer­ing. While the sup­ply chain is crit­i­cal to exe­cute orders on time and make deliv­er­ies to sat­is­fy cus­tomers, the cus­tomer does not direct­ly inter­act with it. 

The cloud prod­ucts SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors and SAP Field­glass deal more with the work­force and inter­nal con­trols rather than cus­tomer-fac­ing process­es, so they have no direct role to play in SAP C/4HANA. Final­ly, the core ERP falls under the scope of SAP S/4HANA, rather than the new SAP C/4HANA offering.

Open­ing Doors for SAP C/4HANA Customers

The added focus SAP is now plac­ing on its front-end expe­ri­ence is open­ing a lot of new doors for SAP — and these are doors cus­tomers can take advan­tage of. Moritz Zim­mer­man, SAP’s CTO of Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence, explains some of these oppor­tu­ni­ties to use SAP C/4HANA in com­bi­na­tion with emerg­ing technologies.

“The front-office space that we’re in is high­ly dynam­ic,” says Zim­mer­man. ​“One area where we’re invest­ing a lot on the mar­ket­ing side is account-based mar­ket­ing. On the com­merce side, a lot can hap­pen by lever­ag­ing machine learn­ing and con­ver­sa­tion­al inter­faces — opti­miz­ing your mer­chan­dis­ing through machine learn­ing, for exam­ple. On the ser­vice side, you’ll see oppor­tu­ni­ties around com­plete­ly new busi­ness mod­els, like out­sourc­ing for ser­vice tech­ni­cians. And on the cus­tomer ser­vice side, you’ll be able to auto­mate a bot or rou­tine tasks like those done by call cen­ter work­ers. There is cross-cut­ting func­tion­al­i­ty in the whole area of order man­age­ment. A big area that we’re work­ing on right now is to achieve the val­ue propo­si­tion of con­nect­ing the front end to the back end and con­nect­ing the demand chain to the sup­ply chain.”

From Best-of-Breed to a Data-Dri­ven Demand Chain

SAP hopes its cus­tomers can see how link­ing these oper­a­tions togeth­er can help their enter­pris­es run more effec­tive­ly than they would by try­ing to build inte­gra­tions among best-in-breed solu­tions. As we men­tioned in our arti­cle on what to expect from SAP C/4HANA, the mas­ter data that runs through each of the clouds in SAP C/4HANA is a key advan­tage for cus­tomers. This access to data across your orga­ni­za­tion will allow you to seam­less­ly view an indi­vid­ual customer’s path through the demand chain until an order is made.

As Alex Atzberg­er, SAP’s Pres­i­dent of Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence, detailed in his state­ment on the release of SAP C/4HANA, ​“It mod­ern­izes the sales-only focus of lega­cy CRM solu­tion by con­tin­u­al­ly engag­ing cus­tomers, instead of end­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion once an order is placed.”

Will busi­ness­es aban­don the recent trend of mov­ing toward the best-in-breed for each indi­vid­ual work­load? Or will they move to stream­line busi­ness process­es by con­nect­ing the front end to the back end? SAP is bank­ing on the fact that SAP C/4HANA will be pow­er­ful enough to change the men­tal­i­ty of its cus­tomers and prospects. Time will tell if this is a bet that SAP will cash in on.

If you’re look­ing for inno­v­a­tive ways to delight your cus­tomers, don’t miss our Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence Inno­va­tion Forum, our newest event for retail­ers, con­sumer prod­ucts com­pa­nies, and wholesalers.