SAP CRM

SAP CRM
Developer(s)	SAP SE
Initial release	1992;32 years ago
Stable release	EHP 4 (v7.0) / 2009;15 years ago
Operating system	Windows, macOS, Linux, Unix
Platform	Cross-platform software (SAP C/4HANA Cloud-based)
Available in	Multilingual
Type	Customer relationship management
License	Commercial, Proprietary
Website	SAP CRM

Last updated January 27, 2024

The SAP CRM applications were initially integrated on-premises customer relationship management (CRM) software manufactured by SAP SE which targeted business software requirements for marketing, sales and service for midsize and large organizations in all industries and sectors. The first SAP CRM release 2.0 has been made generally available in November 2000. The current release 7.0 has been updated with quarterly enhancement packs (EHPs) since 2009.^[1]

In 2007 SAP started to develop a cloud based CRM which has been renamed from SAP Business ByDesign CRM to Sales on Demand to SAP Cloud for Customer^[2] and finally to SAP Cloud for Sales. Since 2018 SAP has consolidated all of its cloud based marketing, sales, service and commerce applications as SAP C/4HANA suite.^[1]

Overview

After the acquisition of Hybris^[3] in 2013, SAP has gradually realigned their CRM strategy mainly to take on the market leader Salesforce.com which is a cloud-based software. In a bid to be more competitive and future focused, SAP has been shifting towards cloud based CRM applications since 2011 rather than traditional on-premises software.^[4] Still SAP CRM is being used by thousands of companies and there are according to SAP no plans to sunset the product.^[5]

SAP has consolidated its CRM applications under the terms "Customer Engagement and Commerce" (CEC)^[6] and since 2018 under "Customer Experience" (CX). SAP offers a variety of (partially acquired) applications:

Customer Profile Management
- SAP Customer Data Cloud (acquired and formerly known as Gigya)
Marketing
- SAP Marketing Cloud (formerly known as SAP Hybris Marketing)
- SAP CRM Marketing (On Premises)
Commerce
- SAP Commerce Cloud (acquired and formerly known as Hybris Commerce)
Sales
- SAP Sales Cloud (formerly known as Cloud for Sales or C4C)
- Callidus Cloud CPQ (acquired)
- SAP CRM Sales (On Premises)
Service
- SAP Service Cloud (formerly known as Cloud for Service or C4S)
- SAP Customer Engagement Center (formerly known as Hybris Service Engagement Center)
- Core Systems (acquired)
- SAP CRM Service (On Premises)
- SAP CRM Interaction Center (On Premises)
Billing
- SAP Subscription Billing (formerly known as Hybris Revenue Cloud)
- SAP Billing and Revenue Management (On Premises and formerly known as SAP BRIM or Hybris Billing)

History

SAP started working on CRM related capabilities in the early 1990s as embedded CRM modules of the SAP R/3 ERP. The "Sales and Distribution" (SD) module of SAP R/3 ERP covered functionalities for:

Customer management and Product catalog (MM).
Pre-sales actions for inquiry, activities and quotation management.
Sales order and delivery management
Pricing, tax and billing including credit management

SAP offered its first stand-alone CRM software in 2000. The initial release of "SAP CRM" 2.0 had been pushed by the acquisition of the German salesforce automation specialist Kiefer & Veittinger with its "Mobile Sales" application.^[7]

In parallel to the new focus for stand-alone SAP CRM, SAP continued to invest in the embedded CRM scenarios as part of its ERP software in 2005. This allowed SAP in 2007 to copy the CRM codeline from the newly developed cloud ERP SAP Business ByDesign and to create the independent "Cloud for Sales" and "Cloud for Service" applications (also known as "Cloud for Customer"). Another example for this copy and paste approach was the decision to move the SAP CRM codelines for service and sales into the S/4HANA ERP which allowed SAP to offer the new "S/4HANA for Customer Management" option.

Major milestones of the SAP CRM development:

SAP R/3 Sales and Distribution (SD) was initially released as part of R/3 Enterprise Edition 1.0 A in 1992
SAP CRM 2000 (2.0) initially released in 2000
SAP CRM 2006 (5.0) released in 2005
SAP CRM 2007 (6.0) released in 2007
SAP CRM 2008 (7.0) released in 2009 as Part of SAP Business Suite 7.0
SAP Business ByDesign Cloud ERP including CRM initially released in 2007
SAP Cloud for Customer initially released in 2011
Hybris acquisition in 2013 and afterwards renaming of its CRM portfolio to SAP Hybris Customer Engagement and Commerce in 2014
CallidusCloud (CPQ, Sales Enablement) and Coresystems (Field Service) acquisition in 2018
Introduction of SAP S/4HANA for Customer Management in 2018 which added the SAP CRM 7.0 service and sales capabilities to S/4HANA ERP core
SAP C/4HANA Customer Experience announced 2018. SAP C/4HANA is an umbrella term for SAP’s combined customer experience products.

Related Research Articles

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information.

SAP R/3 is the former name of the enterprise resource planning software produced by the German corporation SAP AG. It is an enterprise-wide information system designed to coordinate all the resources, information, and activities needed to complete business processes such as order fulfillment, billing, human resource management, and production planning.

SAP SE is a German multinational software company based in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg. It develops enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. The company is the world's leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendor. Apart from ERP software, the company also sells database software and technology, cloud-engineered systems, and other ERP software products, such as human capital management (HCM) software, customer relationship management (CRM) software, enterprise performance management (EPM) software, product lifecycle management (PLM) software, supplier relationship management (SRM) software, supply chain management (SCM) software, business technology platform (BTP) software and programming environment SAP AppGyver for business.

Siebel Systems, Inc. was a software company principally engaged in the design, development, marketing, and support of customer relationship management (CRM) applications—notably Siebel CRM.

Oracle Applications comprise the applications software or business software of the Oracle Corporation both in the cloud and on-premises. The term refers to the non-database and non-middleware parts. The suite of applications includes enterprise resource planning, enterprise performance management, supply chain & manufacturing, human capital management, and advertising and customer experience.

SAP ERP is an enterprise resource planning software developed by the German company SAP SE. SAP ERP incorporates the key business functions of an organization. The latest version of SAP ERP (V.6.0) was made available in 2006. The most recent SAP enhancement package 8 for SAP ERP 6.0 was released in 2016. It is now considered legacy technology, having been superseded by SAP S/4HANA.

SAP Solution Manager is a product developed by the software company SAP SE. It offers end-to-end application lifecycle management to streamline business processes and proactively address improvement options, increasing efficiency and decreasing risk within SAP customers' existing maintenance agreements and managing the application lifecycle.

InsideView is a software as a service (SaaS) company that gathers insights and relationships to provide analytics on marketing to customers. Founded in 2005, InsideView is mainly used by marketing, sales, and operations teams in identifying and gathering information on customers and prospects. In April 2021, the company was acquired by Demandbase, Inc.

Openbravo is a Spanish cloud-based SaaS software provider specializing in retail with headquarters in Pamplona, Spain and offices in Barcelona and Lille. The company was formerly known for being a horizontal open-source ERP software vendor for different industries.

NetSuite Inc. is an American cloud-based enterprise software company that provides products and services tailored for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) including accounting and financial management, customer relationship management, inventory management, human capital management, payroll, procurement, project management and e-commerce software. NetSuite was founded in 1998 with headquarters in Austin, Texas. The company is widely seen as the first cloud computing software company, with its founding pre-dating that of Salesforce by about a month. Oracle Corporation acquired NetSuite for approximately US$9.3 billion in November 2016. The Oracle NetSuite Global Business Unit is managed by Executive Vice President Evan Goldberg as "Oracle’s Cloud ERP for Small and Mid-sized Enterprises with the ability to scale to Fortune 500 firms."

SAP Business ByDesign (ByD) is a cloud enterprise resource planning software that is sold and operated as software as a service by SAP SE. It is designed for small and medium-sized enterprises. The software is designed to provide business processes across application areas from financials to human resources with embedded business analytics, mobility, e-learning, and support.

Oracle CRM is a customer relationship management system created by Oracle Corporation. It includes a number of different cloud applications that can be deployed together or used individually to analyze customer data and help companies connect and manage sales, marketing, and customer support.

SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system developed and marketed by SAP SE. Its primary function as the software running a database server is to store and retrieve data as requested by the applications. In addition, it performs advanced analytics and includes extract, transform, load (ETL) capabilities as well as an application server.

SAP S/4HANA is an enterprise resource planning software for large enterprises developed by SAP SE. It is the successor to SAP R/3 and SAP ERP and is optimized for SAP's in-memory database SAP HANA.

SAP Anywhere is a front office software package from SAP for small and medium sized enterprises (SMBs). In early 2018 SAP decided to sunset the product and to focus in the SMB market on the established SAP Business One and SAP Business ByDesign ERP solutions.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a set of enterprise accounting and sales software products offered by Microsoft. Its flagship product, Dynamics GP, was founded in 1981.

Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX) is a suite of cloud-based applications offered by Oracle Corporation that includes tools for advertising, marketing, sales, e-commerce, customer service.

References

1 2 3 "What is SAP CRM? (Customer Relationship Management)". letschatsap.com. 22 August 2013. Retrieved 18 April 2019.
↑ "Technical comparison between S4CRM and C4C". SAP Community. 30 March 2018.
↑ "SAP Hybris". www.hybris.com. Archived from the original on 3 August 2016. Retrieved 31 July 2016.
↑ "SAP gives CRM another shot with new cloud-based suite". 22 April 2018. Retrieved 4 January 2019.
↑ "What's New in SAP CRM 7.0 for 2018". 22 September 2014. Retrieved 31 July 2016.
↑ "SAP Moves Beyond CRM With Customer Engagement and Commerce". 22 September 2014. Retrieved 31 July 2016.
↑ Neumann, Clas; Srinivasan, Jayaram (22 September 2014). "Mergers and Acquisitions". Managing Innovation from the Land of Ideas and Talent. pp. 225–234. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.456.4494 . doi:10.1007/978-3-540-89283-0_8. ISBN 978-3-540-89282-3.

Sources

Kalaimani J. (2016) Implementing SAP CRM 7. In: SAP Project Management Pitfalls. Apress, Berkeley, CA. doi:10.1007/978-1-4842-1389-6_17
Yi Wu and Fengping Wu, "Notice of Retraction: Researches on SAP-CRM's application in cigarette manufacturing factory," 2011 2nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Management Science and Electronic Commerce (AIMSEC), 2011, pp. 4762-4765, doi:10.1109/AIMSEC.2011.6010222.
A. D. Berdie, M. Osaci, I. Muscalagiu and G. Prostean, "A case-study about a web business application implemented in different SAP UI technologies," 2012 7th IEEE International Symposium on Applied Computational Intelligence and Informatics (SACI), 2012, pp. 111-114, doi:10.1109/SACI.2012.6249986.
Kale, V. (2014). Implementing SAP CRM: The Guide for Business and Technology Managers. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-482-23142-7. LCCN 2014033351.
Singh, S.K. and Sood, K. (2018). SAP Sales Cloud: Sales Force Automation with SAP C/4HANA. SAP Press. Rheinwerk Publishing Incorporated. ISBN 978-1-493-21528-7. LCCN 2018001347.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
Kirchler, M. and Manhart, D. and J{\"o}rg Unger (2009). Service with SAP CRM. SAP business. Galileo Press. ISBN 978-1-592-29206-6.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

External links

Official website

Official website

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[SAP_CRM-1] 1 2 3 "What is SAP CRM? (Customer Relationship Management)". letschatsap.com. 22 August 2013. Retrieved 18 April 2019.

[2] "Technical comparison between S4CRM and C4C". SAP Community. 30 March 2018.

[3] "SAP Hybris". www.hybris.com. Archived from the original on 3 August 2016. Retrieved 31 July 2016.

[4] "SAP gives CRM another shot with new cloud-based suite". 22 April 2018. Retrieved 4 January 2019.

[5] "What's New in SAP CRM 7.0 for 2018". 22 September 2014. Retrieved 31 July 2016.

[6] "SAP Moves Beyond CRM With Customer Engagement and Commerce". 22 September 2014. Retrieved 31 July 2016.

[7] Neumann, Clas; Srinivasan, Jayaram (22 September 2014). "Mergers and Acquisitions". Managing Innovation from the Land of Ideas and Talent. pp. 225–234. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.456.4494 . doi:10.1007/978-3-540-89283-0_8. ISBN 978-3-540-89282-3.

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