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"
Invest and Innovate Today: Grow Your Business Tomorrow Revel in
how, with hard work, great ideas and talented people, you have stayed ahead of the curve in your
fast-changing market."
Source : SAP
Invest and Innovate Today—Grow your Business Tomorrow
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Small Businesses Success,
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Small Online Businesses.
FLOURISH THROUGH INNOVATION
As a successful small or midsize company, you’ve
established your brand and reputation by consistently
delivering an exceptional product or service. With hard
work, great ideas, and talented people, you have managed
to stay ahead of the curve in your fast-changing market.
Now the challenge is to come up with the next innovation
in product design or service delivery to keep momentum
and customer satisfaction growing.
Investing in your operations and employees
creates a solid foundation for
innovation. By automating and optimizing
business processes, you gain the
efficiency, clarity, and flexibility you need
to support the creative development of
products and services. Employees in
such an environment spend less time
on manual and mundane business
tasks, focusing instead on generating
new ideas and innovative products.
This paper examines how integrated
soft ware solutions help you invest and
innovate to sustain your company’s
growth by:
- Differentiating products and services
- Bringing new products to market
efficiently
- Keeping your costs down and prices
competitive
- Developing the best talent for innovation
DELIVER INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS
AND SERVICES
Differentiate to Sustain Growth
You can differentiate your company
from competitors by creating specialized
or customized products or services,
by raising the bar on customer service,
or simply by offering lower prices.
But first you need a deep understanding
of your customers’ needs and expectations.
With that insight, you can
enhance existing products, develop
new ones, and promote brand identity
and customer loyalty.
A clear-eyed view of your market is
enabled by accurate and accessible
customer, order, and sales data. Too
often, however, important numbers
are lost in a fractured information
system of departmental spreadsheets,
inconsistent customer IDs, and inaccurate
inventory reports. An integrated
software solution from SAP can make
a crucial difference. With reliable and
timely information on customer buying
trends, for example, you can have
innovative products and services ready
to catch the next customer wave.
Profitable growth also depends on your
ability to recognize and respond to new
market opportunities. You need nimble
business processes that synchronize
suppliers, production, and administration
to fulfill customer demands before your
competition does. Built-in analytics and
reporting can provide a clear, up-to-date
view of sales data, competitive analysis,
and supplier capabilities, positioning
you to stay one step ahead of your
customers’ needs.
Open Markets with New Products
and Services
Designing an innovative product or
offering a radical new service is a great
achievement. But bringing your innovation
to market quickly – and managing
the complex development process
required to do so – is a big hurdle,
perhaps the biggest, for many com panies
trying to do just that. Can your suppliers
provide the raw materials? Have you
identified the most efficient distribution
channels? Can your facilities meet demand?
Will your employees be trained
in time to support the product or service?
Bringing a product to market efficiently
not only helps guarantee a success -
ful launch; it increases margins. For
example, by identifying the most viable
markets before you manufacture the
first unit, you can focus sales resources
on the best opportunities. Integrating
customer and pipeline data supports
decisions on production schedules,
customizations, and support levels.
To optimize marketing spend, you need
to track the performance of marketing
and promotional campaigns over time.
Once you’ve launched your innovations
into the marketplace, you need to
monitor their progress closely. SAP®
solutions for small businesses and
midsize companies enable you to track
sales pipelines, customer adoption rates,
and marketing programs, so you can
quickly adapt strategies in response
to customers’ buying patterns and
satisfaction levels.
SUPPORT OUTSTANDING PRODUCTS
AND PEOPLE
Automate and Optimize for Faster
Innovation
To inspire innovation, your company
should focus its resources on product
development and service enhancement,
not on manual data entry or transaction
processing. A new product launch can
be stymied by inflexible accounting
or purchasing programs. Inefficient
customer feedback loops can have you
developing product enhancements for
one-off requests or an unprofitable
market segment. But automating crossfunctional
business processes – from
closing your books on time to providing
customers with timely and accurate
change orders – supported by SAP software
helps optimize the fundamental
activities of your business. For example,
SAP software fluidly processes sales
orders to improve the timelines and
accuracy of order fulfillment and uses
real-time account postings to cut the
time required for month-end close from
weeks to days.
Beyond simply improving day-to-day
efficiencies, SAP solutions support the
management of the entire innovation
life cycle – from product design, collaborative
engineering, and material
requirements planning to project
management, documentation, and
quality assurance. A single source of all
product-related information, supported
by integrated product management
software, yields highly coordinated
innovation. This enhances quality,
accelerates time to market, and,
above all, makes the best possible
use of time, money, and resources.
Manage Talent to Focus on Innovation
Creativity. Thinking outside the box.
Providing outstanding customer service.
These are the attributes of an innovative
and motivated workforce. Your challenge
is to attract, retain, and reward a team
that is focused on innovation – and
supports your business objectives.
Managing your workforce effectively
means more than yearly pay reviews.
Competitive salaries may attract the
right people, but opportunities for
growth and creativity keep them innovative,
which, in turn, benefits the company
with new products and services.
With SAP solutions, you gain the
comprehensive HR processes and
reporting tools you need for recruiting,
staffing, payroll, performance management,
and employee training. Your
managers can devote their attention
to finding great applicants, enhancing
employee performance, and supporting
the training needed for new product
and service initiatives.
SUSTAIN THE MOMENTUM
At the heart of every business is the
desire to grow. Innovation creates the
products and services that customers
crave and opens up markets that provide
a rush of growth-sustaining profits.
That’s entrepreneurship – business at
its best.
SAP solutions for small businesses and
midsize companies support product
and service innovation so you can build
in differentiation, carve out a competitive
advantage, and support sustainable
growth. With an SAP solution infrastructure,
you can bring new and customized
products and services to market faster.
By investing in talented people and
the training and tools they need, you
are providing a fertile environment for
innovation. And by automating manual
tasks, you enable employees to focus
on developing innovative products,
delivering outstanding service, and
satisfying customers, all of which are
key factors of differentiation.
SAP Solutions for Small Businesses and Midsize Companies
When it comes to the specialized
needs of small businesses and
midsize companies, one solution
certainly doesn’t fit all. SAP offers
a portfolio of flexible and affordable
business management solutions
designed specifically for the fastchanging
requirements of small
businesses and midsize companies.
By seamlessly integrating sales,
customers, financials, and operations,
SAP solutions give you the
cross-company visibility you need
to base every decision on real-time
information.
Armed with insight into every aspect
of your business, you can easily
monitor performance, eliminate
inefficiencies, and, most important,
identify profitable opportunities.
With standardized, proven solutions
from SAP available at a predictable
cost, small businesses and midsize
businesses can streamline operations,
act on instant and complete
information, and accelerate profitable growth.
Trusted by more than
34,000 small and midsize customers
around the world, SAP offers the
industry experience and the best-fit
solutions to help you stay ahead of
the competition.
To learn more about the SAP solution
portfolio for small businesses and
midsize companies, visit
www.sap.com/sme.