The SAP Business as Unusual book by Thomas Saueressig and Peter Maier was released at the end of December. (click on badge on left to link to the Amazon page). The book relies heavily on conversations with SAP, customer, partner, research firm and SAP.iO Foundries startup executives in over 25 countries and on visits to Industry 4.0 and Customer Experience Centers at key SAP global locations.
We ended up with hundreds of hours of videos and 2,500 pages in transcripts, slides and research papers. We plan to showcase a selection of video excerpts for each chapter so readers can get to know the contributors a bit better and get a glimpse at some of the SAP assets described in the book. These are bite sixed excerpts – in most cases less than 5% of the conversations we recorded.
Leading off for Ch. 4 and Megatrend 3 of 8 – New Customer Pathways – is Matt Laukaitis, EVP/Global GM, Consumer Industries at SAP. The chapter includes plenty of his commentary, that from Fressnapf, the largest European pet product retailer, and other SAP executives such as Achim Schneider, Global Head of SAP’s retail industry business unit and Ritu Bhargava, chief product officer of SAP’s CX solutions. It also profiles the Intelligent Store at the SAP Experience Center in Walldorf.
Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer, Publicis Groupe has this to say about the book
“The last several years have seen a rapid evolution of commerce from a simple wholesale business model to a robust "platform" model with a rich combination of products and services, often with a recurring component. This book provides an ideal playbook as to exactly how those changes have impacted customer expectations, and most importantly what companies need to do to meet those new expectations.”
In the chapter, Manuel Cranz, VP of Enterprise Architecture at Fressnapf, talks about their ecosystem of physical and growing digital products and services for pets and their owners. It has over 18,000 stores across 11 European countries.
In a series of conversations, Achim Schneider showed off his global reach as he discussed technology in stores and the continued growth in direct to consumer models.
Ritu Bhargava describes a visit to a Coop grocery store in Switzerland – the future of customer experience in retail.
Ritu had talked about The Intelligent Store at SAP’s Customer Experience Center at Walldorf. Here is a short tour and the chapter describes further the technologies at this showcase store
The twin of this post with text and graph excerpts is here
