KUALA LUMPUR: SAP Malaysia’s business strategy for 2016 bets heavily on its SAP HANA platform to deliver greater customer segmentation and focus for the forthcoming year.
SAP Malaysia managing director Terrence Yong emphasised that this two-pronged strategy of segmentation and focus would ensure all its enterprise customers are empowered to be more operationally efficient and effective in delivering optimal results.
“SAP’s HANA platform empowers enterprises to segment high volumes customer data at unparalleled speed,” said Yong
“The power of SAP HANA enables enterprises to work with large amounts of granular data to better understand customer demands, behaviours and preferences – targeting the precise audience with the right offers across every customer segments, tactics and channels,” he added.
SAP HANA is an in-memory computing platform that has completely transformed the relational database industry in recent years. It combines database, application processing, and integration services on a single platform. The same architecture also provides libraries for predictive, planning, text processing, spatial, and business analytics.
“SAP HANA is the industry’s ‘secret sauce’ which empowers enterprises to ‘do more with less’ while empowering them to prepare and capitalise on today’s digital economy,” said Yong.
“Since complexity is the barrier to growth for most enterprises, what SAP HANA is renowned for is its ability to simplify the IT environment while releasing the intelligence in business data and processes,” added Yong.
“That way, enterprises can accelerate critical decisions and innovate throughout their operations.”
When asked about why SAP came out with its HANA strategy, Yong replied that, within today’s constant changing landscape, companies need to constant reinvent themselves to stay relevant and effective.
“We came out with SAP HANA to empower enterprises to change the way they do business. If you want to do a reorganisation, for example, HANA allows you to do that on the fly,” said Yong.
“In this vein, SAP has strived to remain relevant in our industry, and we are always reinventing ourselves. It is no longer just enough for you to be able to do things like how you did them before,” he added.
“SAP’s traditional strength has always been in enterprise resource planning (ERP). However, with disruption happening and the arrival of the digital economy, the name of the game has gone beyond ERP. It is about ensuring that customers have the right digital platform to engage with their external audiences and stakeholders,” he added.
When asked about how Malaysian enterprises can better control costs and better manage risk from a procurement perspective, Yong replied that local enterprises should look at improving their entire buying and settlement process end-to-end.
“The procurement game is all about aiming for compliance, control and visibility and SAP’s Ariba’s procurement software solutions do all these while delivering even more,” said Yong.
“With Ariba, some SAP customers have had their buying cycles shortened by 50 percent to 70 percent, and realised supply savings and must lower processing costs than before,” he added. “In other words, it is about attaining greater speed, performance, reach, and usability.”
Malaysia's Sunway Group is a good example other companies can learn from, cited Yong.
Having selected an Ariba solution to deliver a cloud platform as part of a procurement business transformation plan, the transition has empowered Sunway Group's 13,000 staff to leverage on-demand applications and also deliver best practices and standardisation of its procurement practices.
This is because Ariba offers the Sunway Group the scalability to expand and consolidate, improve transparency and create a metric-driven approach that delivers exponential savings and sustainable competitive advantage.
“SAP simplifies everything and helps enterprises streamline processes, so that they have the ability to create new growth opportunities and stay ahead of the competition,” concluded Yong.