SAP Announces mySAP CRM Update At SAPPHIRE '05

May 18, 2005

German software giant SAP today announced it has released the newest version of its mySAP Customer Relationship Management, the company's offering to the contact center/customer care industry. Coinciding with SAP's enormous user conference, SAPPHIRE '05, in Boston, the product release includes details on the update from the previous mySAP.

Release is below.

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SAP’s Next Evolution of CRM Delivers Customer-Inspired Innovation
mySAP™ CRM 2005 Delivers on Continuing Solution Investment by Putting the Power and Ease of CRM in the Hands of Users

Demonstrating continuing evidence of its CRM market leadership, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the next evolution of mySAP™ Customer Relationship Management (mySAP CRM), the culmination of a series of innovations inspired by customers across more than 25 industries. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® ’05, SAP’s international customer conference being held in Boston, Massachusetts, May 17 - 19.

Building on the input and best business practices from its base of more than 2,900 CRM customers, mySAP CRM 2005 will deliver new levels of innovation across key business processes for the telecommunication, public sector and financial services industries, as well as key cross-industry business capabilities such as service management, marketing resource management and mobile sales for handhelds. Powered by the SAP NetWeaver™ platform, complete with embedded analytics and featuring enhanced dashboard-like analytical applications, the new version of mySAP CRM focuses on helping customers enhance user productivity by empowering users with a complete view of all relevant information from diverse enterprise systems to drive insight, decisions and cross-enterprise collaboration.

“We have worked closely with our member customers to define enhancements that best support their evolving business processes and industry demands,” said Tim Ronan, Influence Council Coordinator, CRM Solution User Group, Americas’ SAP Users’ Group (ASUG). “We took this insight and worked with SAP’s product development team to help ensure that present and future SAP customers have the business processes they need to seize opportunities and help take their business forward—mySAP CRM continues to be truly customer-inspired innovation.”

Cross-Industry Enhancements
mySAP CRM 2005 will bring a slate of custom-developed extensions into the globally available CRM capability stack, including cross-industry processes to address all lines of business across marketing, sales and service through all customer interaction channels. These capabilities include:

Enhanced marketing capabilities:

Marketing resource management (MRM) – lets marketers focus on strategic planning, freeing up time spent on administrative marketing tasks
E-mail response management system (ERMS) – increases accuracy and efficiency of outbound communications while turning inbound queries into sales opportunities

Enhanced sales capabilities:

Mobile sales functionality – new and improved capabilities for field sales representatives to access and update information from mySAP CRM in real time via handheld devices
Channel management – improves sales opportunities though integrated campaign management, partner notification and collaborative planning and forecasting

Enhanced service capabilities:

Significant service management enhancements—in areas such as service contract and entitlement management, service order management, warranty, complaints and returns processing—provide real-time control and visibility across service network activities, improving service delivery times while reducing internal costs, tapping new sources of income and boosting customer loyalty

“With mySAP CRM 2005, SAP has reassured customers of the continuity of their IT investment,” said Mary Wardley, VP CRM Applications, IDC. “The incorporation of these new cross-industry, role-based enhancements coupled with attention to a more user-friendly interface are all additive in helping to speed user adoption, increase productivity and ultimately to enhance ROI.”

Industry Innovation for the Public Sector, Telecommunications and Financial Services Having achieved CRM leadership in its stronghold industries, SAP has focused on enhancing business processes in growth industries.
New case management processes will enable public sector organizations to better collect structured and unstructured information related to an individual case, making it easier for case managers to determine entitlements, compliance and service deployment with an eye on improved social outcomes.
By creating a single view of the customer across all departments and partner networks, mySAP CRM 2005 will help telco companies unify their increasingly diversified operations and maintain one interface with the customer. The faster, more actionable customer insight and capabilities enabled with the new version will help telco companies model, launch, sell and more quickly fulfill the multitude of products and services necessary for business growth in this highly competitive industry.
In the financial services sector, where banks have relied traditionally on paper-based processes in managing customer loans, mySAP CRM 2005 will enable real-time collaboration across departments and credit bureaus worldwide. Banks can better serve customers through a tightly integrated business and IT landscape that supports the complete loan origination and contract management process from inquiry to acceptance.

Empowering the User with Role-Relevant Insight
Embedded analytics in mySAP CRM 2005 bridges the gap between operational, collaborative and analytical processes. For example, new account planning capabilities in mySAP CRM 2005 enable account managers to more effectively manage their daily sales business from wherever they are located, leveraging the tight integration of sales analytics with account, opportunity and territory management.

Enhanced Ease-of-Use to Boost Productivity
Because end-user adoption and ease-of-use contribute to greater success and lower costs of a CRM rollout, mySAP CRM 2005 will feature a more intuitive user interface that leverages the enterprise portal, Web application and business intelligence capabilities of SAP NetWeaver. By making it easier for users to extract information and perform business tasks, the latest evolution of the CRM user interface will help reduce task handling times, training costs and number of clicks. For example, hyperlinks enable users to navigate from any analytical report directly to the original document, such as a cumulated order list to the single order document. By optimizing task handling within order management, mySAP CRM is expected to help telecommunication companies reduce the time it takes to enter an order by 80 percent.

“While other CRM vendors have been focused on trying to get their houses in order, SAP has remained above the noise—continuously investing in new R&D and setting a safe, solid and steady course of innovation for our customers’ success,” said Peter J. Kirschbauer, general manager, SAP Applications, SAP. “mySAP CRM 2005 manifests our continuing commitment to delivering value through solutions that help customers achieve business value quickly, adapt to changing demands and innovate for future growth.”

Modular elements of mySAP CRM 2005 are currently being evaluated by customers. The complete and newest version will be globally available in October of 2005.