Retail's Big Deal: SAP Transforms Promotion Management

NEW YORK, Jan. 10, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The explosion of multichannel shopping has shifted the competitive, consumer-driven world of retail into warp speed. To help retailers hit their afterburners, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today introduced the latest version of the SAP® Promotion Management for Retail application. This announcement was made at the National Retail Federation (NRF) 100th Annual Convention and Expo, being held January 9-12, 2011, at the Javits Convention Center in New York.

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With the new release, SAP aims to make promotions management a precise science. New features enable retailers to streamline marketing and merchandising promotional processes, create multichannel promotions to reach new and existing shoppers, and forecast offers to help make better and more profitable decisions. Designed with the retail end-customer in mind, SAP Promotion Management for Retail 7.1 helps promotional teams by automating and managing the complexities of localized promotions for flyers, printed ads, store promotions, e-mail/Web and mobile tactics. This allows retailers to reach segmented consumers shopping across multiple channels and localized regions and thereby improve their financial performance.

Streamlining Promotional Processes

The creation of an effective promotion involves close collaboration among members of marketing, merchandising, advertising and finance teams to carefully plan and execute campaigns while also increasing financial performance and meeting customer demand. SAP Promotion Management for Retail streamlines and simplifies the complex, cross-functional process and provides scalable version control so that everyone sees the same plan and data, completely up to date, at any time. Simultaneously, multiple versions of the promotion can be published based on varying tactics. The entire process is paperless and centralized, even for teams working across several regions, time zones and banners.

Promotions Without Boundaries

Retailers can no longer afford to create barriers between their shoppers and their business. Newer technologies have made access to information, other shoppers and commerce easier and more interesting. As social networking, interactive applications and mobile devices permeate the world of commerce, retailers need the means to manage, understand and execute their promotions in a meaningful and profitable fashion. With these changes, the process of tracking customer demand and lift to promotions must also evolve. Retailers must be able to financially manage and track their promotional spend across all channels, not just their traditional channels, in a way that creates lift and also targets their consumers regardless of where they may shop today or in the future.

Forecast Calls for Profit

Perhaps the most complex and most important need in the world of promotions management is the ability to forecast, simulate and evaluate financial outcomes at the offer, category and event levels. SAP Promotion Management for Retail is equipped with science-based tools to help retailers understand, via a forecasting engine, what promotions are most profitable before a tactic is executed, through analyzing point-of-sale data. Category managers must work with vendors to create promotions that help them meet their financial targets. SAP Promotion Management for Retail enables these managers to evaluate the promotion in the context of any vendor deal being offered. The tool also allows for budget management from planned to forecasted, enabling them to go back to vendors to negotiate deals.

"The exciting developments occurring in retail and commerce have given retailers incredible new ways to reach their target audiences, but the process can be overwhelming without a software system to transform the sophistication into simplicity," said Bob McFarland, senior vice president and general manager of the U.S. Retail Organization, SAP America. "With SAP Promotion Management for Retail, retailers gain the tools necessary to not only generate more effective targeted promotions, but also increase the bottom line by identifying the most profitable promotions based on shopper demand."

About SAP

SAP is the world's leading provider of business software(*), offering applications and services that enable companies of all sizes and in more than 25 industries to become best-run businesses. With more than 105,000 customers in over 120 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE, under the symbol "SAP." For more information, visit www.sap.com.

(*) SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource planning, business intelligence, and related applications.

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.

Copyright © 2011 SAP AG. All rights reserved.

SAP, R/3, mySAP, mySAP.com, xApps, xApp, SAP NetWeaver and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries all over the world. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. Data contained in this document serve informational purposes only. National product specifications may vary.

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SOURCE SAP AG

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