2023 proved time and again that retailers and their software partners know how to rise to the occasion in the face of increasing pressures – and that they can quickly implement new processes and operations when necessary.

51·çÁ÷has worked in the retail space for decades, helping every business across the ecosystem run at its best. Across this shared history, with our industry partners and end customers, our ecosystem has shown repeatedly the organic growth that is possible because of strong relationships.

Here are some prime examples of retail partners serving as innovation and growth multipliers last year:

Coveo’s innovative artificial intelligence (AI) platform helps deliver real value to customers, solving business challenges as only AI can. For retailers, Coveo for 51·çÁ÷Commerce Cloud can assist in finding and recommending products faster to help drive more revenue, optimize campaigns, and power generative experiences. The enterprise-class AI platform can be deployed on top of 51·çÁ÷in a secure and highly scalable fashion. The result: intelligent site search, tailored recommendations, generative experiences, and personalized, memorable shopping experiences for all customers.

Mention Me makes it possible to harness word of mouth’s true power, thanks to the world’s first Customer Advocacy Intelligence Platform. Powered by advanced AI, the platform enables businesses to identify, nurture, and activate their loyal advocates, building a virtuous cycle of customer love and superior economics so that fans keep coming back for more.

Enterprises can launch digital experiences faster with Contentful, which connects with 51·çÁ÷Commerce Cloud to enable commerce projects of any size, both for the Web and for multichannel experiences. Simply put, Contentful can make it easier for retailers to create and manage digital experiences via structured content built for speed, change, and scale. Using one hub – that integrates with hundreds of tools to help personalize and optimize – for easy collaboration, businesses can make their content work harder, so they can work smarter.

The Last Mile Delivery Fulfillment Solution from OneRail provides retailers with the ability to instantaneously scale delivery demand. By integrating with 51·çÁ÷Commerce Cloud, OneRail’s offering connects businesses’ e-commerce capabilities with nationwide delivery coverage, meaning retailers can have the ability to ship nationwide with complete visibility, all while providing unique, branded customer experiences. In short: efficiency, from dispatch to doorstep.

With Obsess’ mobile-optimized enterprise platform, retailers can easily build immersive, 3D, virtual stores proven to increase engagement, conversion, and average order value. By integrating with 51·çÁ÷Commerce Cloud, the market-leading experiential shopping platform offering can enable enterprises to approach their customers in a branded, personalized fashion – and make retail shopping fun and memorable again.

Retailers can drive top-notch in-store customer experiences – and build customer loyalty – with the 51·çÁ÷Omnichannel Point-of-Sale application by GK. The configurable application helps enterprises deploy the right business processes efficiently at the point-of-sale, working to reduce their total cost of ownership in the process. Flexible, rules-based configuration also means merchandisers can quickly react to changing business needs, ensuring a more memorable and impactful customer journey from end to end.

The OMS+ Cross-Channel Order Management Solution from DataXstream is an integrated offering built for counter, call center, and mobile sales. OMS+ reimagines the user interface to reflect real-life customer engagements and can provide the platform for making 51·çÁ÷ERP the foundation of a truly unified commerce strategy. It can also automate time-consuming activities to help ensure your team gets more done in less time, meaning increased sales, reduced costs, and an improved customer experience overall.

The Loyalty Experience Platform from Annex Cloud is built around the idea of organically driving retention and loyalty through every stage of the customer journey. The app offers engaging experiences via incentives at first touch, then as the consumer becomes a prospect, a customer, a repeat customer, and eventually an advocate. Moreover, it guides customer behavior by offering loyalty points for a variety of actions, including purchasing, referring friends, writing reviews, sharing pictures, signing up for newsletters, and more. And it all integrates with 51·çÁ÷Commerce Cloud.

Retailers looking to maximize revenue and minimize risk should look no further than the Forter Trust Platform for Digital Commerce. The real-time, automated decision platform helps reduce false declines and chargebacks by up to 90%, increasing approval rates so merchants can expand their business. It underlines fraud prevention strategies, enabling safety and security for your commerce processes so you can focus on the business decisions that truly impact growth and retention.

With Aisera, retailers can truly unleash the power of generative AI and automation by reimagining and revolutionizing their services experience. Aisera AI Customer Service provides instant self-service and autonomous resolutions to customer requests across any channel, offering a virtually unlimited supply of “agents” to leading enterprises. Seamless integration with 51·çÁ÷can also simplify efforts to help improve customer satisfaction, agent productivity, and support costs, so that retailers can exceed expectations and focus on building their business.

Paradox’s leading conversational AI recruiting software is helping clients like Nestle and Unilever automate candidate screening processes, text campaigns, 1:1 texting, interview scheduling, mobile-first assessments, onboarding, and more – all in a mobile experience fully integrated into 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors solutions. In other words, it can help enterprises hire faster and better than ever, building a foundation for consistent and repeatable future success.

Craig Schertler is vice president of Consumer Industries Global Partner Ecosystem at SAP.

One day might bring news of collaboration between companies that historically have been fierce rivals, or a customer implementation of modest scope that grows into a much larger and more lucrative project. Another day could bring reports of a new app or solution that uses an exciting tech wrinkle to fill a need for multiple customers. And another could bring news of an 51·çÁ÷partner breaking into a new market or vertical by developing a solution with applicability across multiple industries, then monetizing it on .

A solution developed by 51·çÁ÷partner DataXstream highlights the possibilities that SAP’s industry cloud offers to partners that serve consumer industries. The solution, , helps streamline order management. The results it’s producing for customers are impressive: higher margins, lower inventory and training costs, and an improved understanding among wholesalers and retailers of their customers. Using the solution, one customer not only realized ROI within seven days, it saw a 1.5% increase in margin on sales and a 50% reduction in inventory carrying cost during the first year following implementation. That’s US$7 million added to the bottom line and $50 million in reduced inventory carrying cost.

Stories like this are among many developments I’ve been following in SAP’s partnership-driven, collaborate-to-innovate industry cloud ecosystem, which includes consumer-focused verticals like consumer products, retail, life sciences, healthcare, wholesale distribution, agribusiness, and fashion, along with more than a dozen other verticals. Here are some recent highlights from the consumer industries segment of the ecosystem:

• Apps developed exclusively by partners, with little to no involvement from SAP other than to provide the business technology platform (51·çÁ÷Business Technology Platform) and a marketplace (51·çÁ÷Store) in which to sell them.
• Apps built not by a developer but by a large customer’s internal development team, leveraging 51·çÁ÷BTP. One major global consumer products company recently did exactly that, using their 51·çÁ÷Business Technology Platform investment to develop an analytics solution that it is now deployed within a broader 51·çÁ÷digital infrastructure.
• System integrators “bottling” the key elements of a solution they developed for a specific consumer products company to offer it to other companies with a similar need.
• New 51·çÁ÷and partner commercialization models coming to life, enabling partners to quickly benefit from new – and in many cases, substantial – revenue streams created by the solutions they have developed.
• 51·çÁ÷handing over a development opportunity on the wholesale distribution side to an industry cloud partner instead of taking the work on ourselves, recognizing the partner was best equipped to develop the solution.
• Developers with expertise in technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), video graphics, and robotics bringing solutions powered by those capabilities to customers in consumer industries that provide the foundation for business transformation.

What’s particularly gratifying for me is that little to none of this likely would have happened even five years ago. Built on the premise that, by working together, 51·çÁ÷and members of the industry cloud community can create more value for customers and themselves than they otherwise would working separately, the program thus far has produced hundreds of potentially high-impact apps and integrated, end-to-end solutions.

SAP’s industry cloud represents an important evolution of SAP’s approach to partnership and serving the end customer, where the focus is on solving the customer’s business problem whether the solution comes exclusively from an 51·çÁ÷partner, from 51·çÁ÷itself, or a combination of the two, and where partners have a greater opportunity to monetize the solutions they have a role in developing. Ultimately, we’re building a vibrant community that, through co-innovation, creates open, ready-to-integrate, and ready-to-implement solutions to meet critical needs in customers’ business application landscapes.

The hundreds of consumer-focused solutions already produced via SAP’s industry cloud are just the tip of the iceberg. The door is also wide open for existing partners that serve consumer industries to become more engaged in the ecosystem and for new partners to become part of it. If they share SAP’s appetite for co-innovation, if they’re driven like we are to support customers in their business transformation efforts, and if they’re open to finding new partners, customers, markets, and revenue streams, our industry cloud community will welcome them with open arms.

Craig Schertler is lead for Consumer Products Industry Ecosystem at SAP.