SAP contributes to Unilever’s saving of £980 million in costs

In recent years, Unilever has moved to “dramatically” cut the number of suppliers it uses, after at one point using 160 vendors for 1,200 applications. That project, alongside the SAP rollout and a company-wide reorganisation, has helped it save £960 million from costs.

Earlier this year the company said its own SAP rollout, with supplier Accenture, was significantly improving “operational execution” and efficiency, as well as dramatically cutting complexity. The most effective cost cutting was being effected in western Europe, it said, the first region to go live with the system.

Unilever is now facing a large SAP integration, following the announcement it will buy TRESemmé shampoo maker Alberto Culver for $3.7 billion (£2.3 billion).
Unilever, which makes related products including Dove soap and Sunsilk shampoo, as well as other household brands, is standardising globally on SAP enterprise resource planning software.

Unilever said it would become the world’s second largest shampoo maker as a result
of the acquisition, emphasising the importance of the UK, US, Canadian, Mexican and Australasian markets.

Unilever boasts a portfolio of over 400 brands. “With 400 brands spanning 14 categories of home, personal care and foods products, no other company touches so many people's lives in so many different ways.” They are leaders in almost every field within which they work.

The world’s leading, largest and best companies are using SAP and yet it is now within reach of small to midsize companies, supporting them on their quest to become a best run business.

SAP Business One has been designed specifically with small to midsize companies needs in mind. Visit www.beabetterbusiness.co.uk or www.beabetterbusiness.ie to find out more

SAP worth more than Oracle and has greater market share

SAP (NYSE:SAP) and Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) are the two biggest players in the enterprise application software market.

SAP has a greater share of the Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, Business Intelligence, and Supply Chain Management markets. They are the clear world leaders in the provision of business software solutions offering applications and services that enable companies of all sizes and in more than 25 industries to become best-run businesses.
SAP leads Oracle in terms of market share

Market Share (2016 projections) ERP CRM BI SCM
Oracle 15% 17% 18% 17%
SAP 24% 19% 24% 25%

A Trefis Forecast estimates that SAP’s applications software business is worth about $62 billion, versus $45 billion for Oracle’s application software business. (Trefis is a US based financial community helping us to understand how a company’s products impact on their stock price.)

To see how you can join SAP's 102,500 customers, 77% of which are SMEs, visit
www.beabetterbusiness.com

SAP compare themselves to Apple, staying true to their core

SAP's rival Oracle are making an executive suite reshuffle which from SAP's point of few sets the companies on diverging paths.

Oracle is bringing in a top-shelf executive who knows computer hardware, both from his years at H.P. and at NCR before that. That strategic and operational know-how is crucial to Oracle, since it acquired Sun Microsystems earlier this year.

Mr. McDermott, co-chief executive of SAP called the Sun purchase “Oracle’s wild move into hardware.”
By contrast, he said, SAP is “staying true to its core” in software.

The software-only strategy, Mr. McDemott said, insures that SAP’s major corporate partners, which are also hardware makers, like I.B.M. and H.P., remain allies. “For Oracle, they are enemies now,” he said.

SAP, according to Mr. McDermott, will focus primarily on three product lines. The first is business applications, its mainstay business of supplying the software companies use to manage their finances, customer accounts, manufacturing and procurement.

The second is business intelligence software, which companies use to mine data for insights that can increase sales and cut costs. Its Business Objects subsidiary, acquired in 2007 for $6.78 billion, is a leader in business intelligence software.

The third, Mr. McDermott says, is mobile applications for business. Sybase software is already widely used in transporting messages to and from smartphones, and SAP plans to invest heavily in the mobile business. The idea, he said, is to link workers with mobile devices — like smartphones and Apple iPads (SAP has already deployed 2,000 to its workers) — to all the back-end business operations software SAP makes.

“What Apple has done in the consumer space, we’ll do in business applications,”McDermott said.

SAP Ranked Leaders in the Business Intelligence Tools Market

IDC has reported SAP as the market leader in the business intelligence (BI) tools market based on software license and maintenance revenue. IDC also reported that SAP has grown faster than the market for financial performance and strategy management (FPSM) applications for the fourth consecutive year.

“Today's competitive business environment demands real-time visibility into performance, and SAP delivers that by providing our customers with the most comprehensive set of integrated BI and EPM solutions," said Sanjay Poonen, executive vice president and general manager, Business User and Line-of-Business Sales, SAP.

"We continue to lead the combined BI and FPSM market because SAP enables customers to give their employees - from the boardroom to the shop floor - instant insight across all lines of the business so they can contribute to their bottom line. Customers continue to turn to SAP solutions over competitors because we provide a unique vision and approach to analytics, and we deliver those solutions on a modern platform that works with their existing IT environments. This makes it easy for all business users to get up running quickly, so they can focus on running their business more effectively."

SAP is clearly in tune with the diverse needs of businesses relative to their sector and the dynamic nature of the environments in which they reside.
Testament to this is the continued growth which SAP have achieved despite the negative growth overall in the IT market. They are a trusted and extremely well established business software provider and their commitment to innovation is central to their continued success.