Business-to-Business Buying and Selling

Business-to-business MRO and procurement are key components of mySAP.com. Using either the Workplace™ or the Marketplace™, employees will be able to leverage the Internet to obtain better prices, more choice, and faster delivery of basic materials. The procurement scenarios will be able to update accounts payable and accounts receivable and generate invoices. Using mySAP.com to handle procurement allows companies to conduct business with a single point, the mySAP.com Marketplace™ (see below), rather than having to manage a point-to-point network of relationships with many different sellers. Most important, you do not have to establish a technical link to your sellers’ systems. All you need is a browser.

Purchases are ordered through mySAP.com, where the order information is placed in the seller’s mailbox. For auditing purposes, mySAP.com stores all orders and confirmations in a central Message Store at www.mysap.com, so documents can be used to provide assistance in disputes. Sellers can retrieve orders from the mailbox any time, using a browser and choosing from a variety of formats, such as cXML, XML, flat text file, and so on.

Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management (CRM) has an important place in mySAP.com. With mySAP.com, SAP intends to be a strategic, long-term partner in capturing customer value by providing integrated scenarios that enable customer-centric business processes. CRM will enable companies to automate, integrate, and leverage intelligently their relations with customers.

Core CRM functions include Internet sales and service, field sales and service, and Web-enabled customer service applications. Even more CRM functions will soon become available, including telesales, telemarketing, marketing analysis, and product or brand management.

For example, mySAP.com customers will be able to leverage mySAP.com to integrate their direct customer sales with their existing ERP solutions. Catalog business solutions enable companies to sell their products to other firms or consumers over the World Wide Web. mySAP.com will support catalog maintenance and ordering, both of which will integrate seamlessly with back-end systems.

The CRM components of mySAP.com integrate a wealth of customer news, background information, and vendor data. The SAP CRM solution uses the latest technology available from both SAP and other vendors. This application gives your customers the self-service tools they need to manage their accounts 24 hours a day.

The mySAP.com CRM solution is unique; it seamlessly integrates the front-end, Web-based, self-service tools your customers and prospects need with the back-end process systems. This solution helps you anticipate current and potential customer requirements.

Collaborative Planning and Forecasting

Using mySAP.com, companies can extend their supply chain planning capabilities to their trading partners. Just as electronic data interchange (EDI) enabled trading partners in the automotive industry to communicate plans, schedules, and transactional data, the Internet enables many more industries to do the same in a more flexible, collaborative, and cost effective manner. mySAP.com customers can create a multi-level forecast between companies, which can be shared in an open XML or X.12 format between all the stakeholders in a production cycle.

mySAP.com supply chain management (SCM) solutions include scenarios in collaborative forecasting and planning. For example, a manufacturer will be able to integrate sourcing key material from a supplier completely, with end-to-end Internet-enabled integration into a supplier’s backend systems and those of your supplier’s supplier, whether or not the supplier is an SAP customer.

Information and Data Exchange Applications

Much of the collaboration across enterprises involves exchanging information rather than goods. mySAP.com supports a broad base of capabilities that customers can use to manage knowledge flow online.

For example, customers can use mySAP.com to manage inter-company development programs jointly, to perform contract negotiations, to manage RFP/RFQ efforts, and to share engineering information using mySAP.com. mySAP.com will provide a standardized, scalable environment for document and knowledge sharing that is easy to install and use.

Employee Self Service

The SAP Employee Self Service solution consists of a set of easy-to-use applications that empower employees to view, create, and maintain confidential personal data over an intranet or the Internet.