The document outlines several key initiatives that consumer product companies are pursuing to transform their businesses digitally and stay competitive. These initiatives involve developing new digital capabilities along the entire value chain to better understand consumers, customize products and experiences, optimize operations and supply chains, and collaborate more effectively with partners and suppliers. The goals are to accelerate innovation, improve responsiveness to customers, and compete as an ecosystem rather than standalone business.

1. Creating Exceptional
Consumer Experiences
Enable feedback-inspired innovation using
insights to understand consumer expectations
of product features and functionality to
prioritize development
Gather ongoing consumer feedback to
understand perception of design, features,
and functions to optimize the product
experience
Offer products that are configurable and
tailored to individual consumers’ needs and
preferences
Drive efficiency and flexibility in
manufacturing to enable agile responses to
new trends and changing demands
Maximize distribution and availability via
flexible ordering and sourcing, offering
seamless, sales channel experiences and
preferred delivery options
Enable consumers to find what they want,
when they want it, by understanding demand
and temporary demand-influencing factors
Create unified profiles for consumers across
brands, providing increasingly targeted,
personalized and contextually relevant
messaging
Rapidly respond to opportunities and issues
by monitoring brand health in real time with
sales, social listening, reviews and sentiment
indicators
Ensure optimized shopping experiences;
relevant messaging and promotions, visibility,
shoppable merchandising, avoiding stock-
outs
Create exceptional service moments across
touchpoints by enabling teams with real time
intelligence
Ensure product origins meet customer
expectations and brand promise –
transparent, ethical, and sustainable sourcing
Address immediate consumer needs with
responsive procurement and manufacturing
networks
Utilize onboarding and new-hire feedback to
help ensure employees are focused on the
consumer experience
Leverage a unified consumer database to
enable employees to anticipate and respond
to consumer needs across functions
Create resource conserving business models
and report consumer activities and segment
profitability with greater detail
Gain a 360-degree view of customer financial
data and profitability and provide
personalized payment options
Delivering Valuable
Outcomes
Expand the definition of product to include
content, ongoing engagement and "end of
life" and embed them into innovation
processes
Add sensors to products that track when
consumers need to replace, replenish, or
repair the item
Expand manufacturing and production
processes to include finished goods coupled
with services based consumer demand
Leverage smart machines and real time data
to run autonomous, fast and cost efficient
operations
Collaborate in real time across functions and
with customers, channel partners, and
suppliers to orchestrate outcomes in moments
of need
Track and trace products and batches for end-
to-end supply-chain transparency on topics
like carbon footprint or fair origination
Deliver personalized engagements, products,
promotions, and pricing by developing deeper
consumer insights
Identify, capture, and enrich customer profiles
across all sources in a single view to gain
insights into consumers’ real-time intents
Align information and offers to customer
business objectives and real-time needs
Gain greater insight and analyze store
performance by defining KPIs for each point
of engagement
Evaluate supplier risk, foster ethical sourcing,
and secondary marketplace
Engage suppliers digitally to proactively use
and predict consumer demand and adjust
production
Delight employees and increase efficiencies
with digital assistants and easy to use,
automated, consumer-grade apps for
expenses and time management
Empower managers to drive better
experiences
Personalize payment options for seamless
use across all sales channels
Report consumer activities and segment
profitability with greater granularity, resulting
in increased personalization
Meeting Shopper Needs
Throughout the Entire
Consumer Journey
Rapidly adapt formulation, ingredients and
raw material usage to align with increased
sensitivity of consumer perceptions and
trends
Enable product circularity, re-pair, re-use, re-
cycling, rental or re-sale and identify more
sustainable ways to package and deliver
products for each route to market
Initiate end-to-end manufacturing processes
to manage product complexity and react
quickly on changing demands
Deliver mass-produced, personalized
products at scale and prevent stock-outs and
loss of revenue/market share with deep
consumer insights
Enable agile, cost-effective supply network
execution for seamless B2C and B2B2C
order fulfillment
Deliver perfect order experiences with speed,
agility, and effectiveness by linking demand
signals to better forecast inventory
replenishment
Hyper-personalize consumer engagement,
creative content and media in all channels
(paid, owned, earned) to better optimize
marketing spend
Unify consumer insights, leveraging data from
all touchpoints in real time to optimize
consumer journeys with intelligent micro
segmentation
Rapidly deploy headed or headless data-
driven, engaging and personalized e-
commerce experiences across brands,
markets and touchpoints
Extend commercial and transactional brand
reach into social, video and streaming
services with the convergence of commerce
and media
Source proprietary and third-party content to
enhance the consumer experience of
products and services in all channels
Engage suppliers digitally to proactively use
and predict consumer demand and adjust
production
Connect employees directly into digital sales
experiences with consumers in any location
Provide employees with automated
capabilities that empower productivity and
effectiveness in meeting consumers needs
Enable customer preferred and regionally
appropriate payment methods and digital
wallets to reduce purchase friction
Innovate subscription based business models
with recurring billing by flexible scheduling
Competing as an
Ecosystem
Map the personalized digital consumer
experience to understand consumer needs
and desires
Partner with service providers to deliver
comprehensive, branded experiences based
on imperatives like sustainability
Apply available capacity with co-
manufacturing partners to manage demand at
minimal cost and resource consumption
Create a network of distributed manufacturing
capability, including through 3D-printing
capabilities
Develop and manage partnerships with
providers in a logistics business network to
fulfill orders directly to the consumer
Cover complex fulfillment, transportation, and
storage needs through cross-company and
3PL networks (distributed order fulfillment)
Partner on opportunities for cobranding,
shared experiences, and technology-enabled
personalization
Improve the consumer experience through
value-added service delivery enhanced by
partner content
Provide consumer delivery excellence
through last mile logistics providers
Accelerate order fulfillment across
geographies through a flexible supplier
network and orchestrate service delivery from
partner organizations
Gather supplier information from hundreds of
thousands of sources, and quickly analyze
with in-memory technology to ensure
availability
Support higher employee engagement
through total rewards
Create network of contingent labor able to
address skill needs and scale
Foster a climate and Natural Capital
Accounting/Carbon Footprint Management
based on a network in your ecosystem
Create multisided business models that
involve consumers and non-traditional
partners
Accelerating
Operational
Responsiveness
Enable adaptive, seamless product
development and recipe formulation
Capture real-time feedback on product
concepts by evaluating the strengths and
weaknesses of potential ideas
Rely on predictive asset analytics,
preventative maintenance and calibration to
reduce unplanned downtime or outages
Leverage data across the entire product and
process lifecycle to reduce resource
consumption and improve waste disposal
management
Enable better collaboration between shippers
and carriers for sustainable, resource
conserving order fulfillment
Improve speed, efficiency and sustainability,
ensuring sustainability is embedded across
analytical and transactional solutions
Improve promotion planning and execution,
driving personalization across channels
Provide clear metrics and KPI's to improve
return on decisions
Implement activity visit optimization, utilizing
sales order fulfillment cockpit, enabling sales
monitoring and analytics and increased
up/cross-sell opportunities
Use automation and machine learning to
improve sales and service response times
Shorten lead times and reduce inventory by
directly connecting suppliers and co-
manufacturers
Enable smart supply chain tracking for
accurate planning, improving sourcing
savings on direct spend and on-time delivery
Automate work tasks and empower
employees to become knowledge workers
making meaningful data drive decisions in
real time
Increase employee retention and protect
know-how and skills with regular pulse
checks and immediate action
Drive new revenue streams and reduce TCO,
days in inventory, sales outstanding and loss
due to stockouts
Optimize working capital across multiple
channels and mitigate financial risks
associated with highly flexible supply chains
SAP Unified Business Networks
Industry Cloud
SAP
▪ Cloud platform excise tax ▪ Intelligent trade claims management ▪ Rural sourcing management ▪ Incentive administration
▪ Paybacks and chargebacks
Ecosystem
▪ DMS Newspage
Intelligent Suite
SAP S/4HANA®
▪ Project control
▪ Product engineering
▪ Catch weight management
▪ Production operations
▪ Quality management
▪ Manufacturing insights
▪ Production planning
▪ Inventory
▪ Warehousing and transportation
▪ Order promising
▪ Master data management ▪ Order and contract management
▪ Direct store delivery
▪ Multichannel billing
▪ Sourcing and contract management
▪ Operational and service procurement
▪ Invoice and payables management
▪ Supplier management
▪ Procurement analytics
▪ Time recording
▪ Employee central solution connectivity
▪ Accounting and financial close
▪ Financial operations
▪ Cost management and profitability analysis
▪ Enterprise portfolio and project management
▪ Product lifecycle management
▪ Product compliance
▪ Extended production planning and scheduling
▪ Livestock management and meat and fish
operations
▪ Complex manufacturing
▪ Agricultural production
▪ Extended production planning and scheduling
▪ Livestock management and meat and fish
operations
▪ Advanced warehousing, transportation, and
order promising
▪ Customer profile ▪ Sales performance management
▪ Subscription billing and revenue management
▪ Extended procurement ▪ Advanced accounting and financial close
▪ Treasury and risk management
▪ Enterprise risk and compliance
▪ Advanced financial operations
▪ Commodity management
Business areas
▪ Digital operations for R&D ▪ Responsive manufacturing (ME, MII, QIM, VE)
▪ Production operations (MII, QIM)
▪ Digital operations for manufacturing
▪ Integrated business planning
▪ Extended warehouse management
▪ Transportation management
▪ Supply chain collaboration
▪ Marketing cloud ▪ Sales cloud
▪ Commerce cloud
▪ Customer data
▪ Trade management
▪ Digital payments add-on
▪ CRM including trade management
▪ Direct and indirect material sourcing
▪ Supply chain collaboration
▪ Supplier management and collaboration
▪ Strategic sourcing suite
▪ Buying and invoicing
▪ Guided end-user buying
▪ Core human resources and payroll
▪ Talent acquisition
▪ Talent management
▪ Payroll and time and attendance management
▪ People analytics
▪ Governance, risk, and compliance
▪ Financial services network
▪ Digital payments add-on
▪ Financial planning and analysis
Business Technology Platform Analytics (Augmented BI | Predictive Analytics | Data Warehousing) - Intelligent Technologies (Data-driven Insights | Intelligent Robotic Process Automation | Conversational AI | Internet of Things) - Database and Data Management (Pipelining | Virtualization | Governance | Orchestration) - Application Development and Integration (Intelligent Business Process Management | Enterprise Extensions)
*Benefits
are
based
on
early
adopters
of
SAP
S/4HANA,
or
conservative
outside-in
benefits
due
to
moving
from
a
traditional
ERP
system
to
SAP
S/4HANA,
SAP
Intelligent
technologies,
and
other
relevant
SAP
solutions.
Product innovation Manufacturing consumer products Supply chain Marketing Sales and service Sourcing and procurement Human resources Finance
They pursue five key initiatives
that require
new business capabilities
along the value chain.
(21/12) © 2021 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. Solution capabilities that are part of SAP S/4HANA but need to be licensed additionally
Core solution capabilities delivered as part of the SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management solution
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▪ Take charge of their destiny by building digital business capabilities and quickly
identifying and acting on new growth opportunities
▪ Recognize that the digital economy has dramatically changed the competitive
landscape and brought customer engagement to the spotlight
Consumer products companies are at the forefront of digital transformation as they:
Typical business benefits*
▪ Real-time insight for making timely and
relevant decisions
▪ Better compliance and management of
financial risk
▪ Improved employee engagement
▪ Reduced time to full productivity for new hires
▪ Better collaboration with suppliers
▪ Smoother operations with improved spend
insights and higher compliance
▪ Higher internal sales productivity
▪ Greater transparency of end-to-end order
management
▪ Greater return on marketing investment
▪ Higher customer retention
▪ Reduced supply and inventory planning cost
▪ Increased inventory accuracy
▪ Reduced manufacturing cycle time
▪ Improved manufacturing productivity
▪ Lower total costs for new product
development
▪ Accelerated time to market
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