Equipping Businesses to Stay Ahead of Change? Almost every industry in the world is experiencing huge shifts due to volatility in the market, society, and the economy. Today, customers are increasingly looking for exceptional service experiences.
To remain successful in the face of such disruptions and evolving expectations, companies are transforming their business models to the next level. They realize that they need to stay ahead of competition by providing valuable business outcomes to their customers while achieving efficiency, profitability, a great user experience, scalability, and resilience.
This has a major impact on the quote-to-cash requirements as the centerpiece of companies that enable their organizations to sell, deliver, and charge for products and services. Quote to cash is one of the most critical but complex process that encompasses multiple activities in an organization. Whether in a B2B or a B2C setting, it is a comprehensive process that no off-the-shelf, end-to-end solution can handle.
“Cash is king” is an often heard truism in business landscapes, but when it comes to services organizations, it takes a lot more to be successful.
(Products + Services) x Subscriptions = Solution
Transformation means change and that involves understanding both the reason to change and the consequences of change. To thrive today and gain flexibility and variance American Airlines reveals, businesses need to transform to solution-based business models that expand the responsibility beyond the initial sale: products combined with services, often sold with a contractual promise of an outcome.
Right System for the Right Results
SAP enables all customers according to their specific needs and allows them to keep ahead of today’s challenges and quickly adapt to tomorrow’s world. This is done by simplifying the challenges in three main ways:
Be more efficient in what you do
Scale and provide modern ways of selling
Move from selling standalone products and services to offering bundled solutions to customers
SAP S/4HANA Cloud provides all the core quote-to-cash and finance processes that businesses need to adopt a holistic, solution-based business model rather than cobbling various processes together manually. By doing so, it allows a business to transform into a one-stop shop to offer the best solutions to customers.
One-Stop Shop
Our quote-to-cash process makes it possible for your business to integrate new solutions and subscriptions, which in turn enables your company to cut costs, improve efficiency, and gain visibility with your customers throughout the entire life cycle.
A great example is IBM, which recently underwent an enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformation as it moved its processes to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
“IBM introduced SAP S/4HANA as a strategic quote-to-cash platform to accelerate the growth of its subscription license, as-a-service, and software-offering business,” said Prasad Chennuru, chief architect at IBM. “The market-leading capabilities of SAP S/4HANA to sell holistic solution and subscription bundles enabled IBM to improve the performance and usability of its order management and financial processes, thus reducing time to value and time to market.”
Besides the business transformation to bundled solutions, quote to cash also powers modern product and service sales by putting user experience at the center and enables streamlined, intelligent, and automated processes to take manual tasks away from the end user.
Our New Generation of Sales
Today the pace of data generation is accelerating, with 90% of the world’s data having been generated in the last two years alone. In addition, last year about 51% of the workloads were processed in the cloud and this will only grow in the foreseeable future. Exponential growth of this kind means that customer experience will become one of the key brand differentiator — dethroning price and product as the leading factors.
With quote to cash as one of an organization’s most critical and complex processes, few ever look to make improvements — until a crisis shocks them into realizing the problems and pitfalls of an inefficient quote-to-cash process.
But complexity conceals value and opportunity. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, customers can refine their quote-to-cash process to improve performance and scalability that enables a seamless end-to-end process integration and helps boost sales and service productivity by using intelligent technologies like robotic process automation and machine learning. This supports making the right decisions at the right time with embedded advanced analytics and leveraging the pay-per-use offerings.
CEWE, one of Europe’s leading photo service providers, acquired and integrated WhiteWall to expand service and reach. Prior to its acquisition, WhiteWall’s order processing capabilities were limited by its existing systems, which prevented the company from taking full advantage of seasonal sales periods, such as the winter holidays. Today, SAP S/4HANA Cloud automates and accelerates the quote-to-cash process. From the moment a customer places an order on one of WhiteWall’s online stores, the SAP solution processes the sales order, starts the production, then manages payments from PayPal and other payment providers.
According to Alexander Nieswandt, founder of WhiteWall Media GmbH, “Our employees think it’s great because they don’t have to wait for processes to run in the background; they can really concentrate on their work and focus on providing an even better service to our customers.”
