Contents

SAP Customer Activity Repository (CAR) and its applications........................................................3

High Level Solution Architecture................................................................................................3
Retail Model...............................................................................................................................3
Overview SAP CAR..................................................................................................................... 4
1- SAP Promotion Management for Retail.............................................................................4
Process Flow......................................................................................................................5
Benefits:............................................................................................................................. 5
Implementation Consideration...................................................................................6
Promotional Planning & Calendar (PPC) Overview..............................................6
2- Merchandise Planning........................................................................................................8
Solution Overview........................................................................................................... 8
3- Assortment Planning..........................................................................................................9
Overview Solution........................................................................................................... 9
Assortment Definition..................................................................................................10
Assortment Type............................................................................................................10
Assortment Dimension................................................................................................10
Assortment Example....................................................................................................10
Assortment Planning level......................................................................................... 11
Seasonal Assortment Planning.................................................................................11
Assortment Planning - Option plan.........................................................................12
Seasonal Assortment Planning – Style/Color Mix...............................................13
Non-seasonal Assortment Planning – Overview.................................................14
Merchandise and Assortment Planning Integration..........................................15
Integration between BI & Retail System...............................................................17
4- SAP Allocation management............................................................................................17
Solution Overview.........................................................................................................17
Business Scenarios....................................................................................................... 18
5- Fraud Management..........................................................................................................19
 Common Fraud Scenarios...........................................................................................19
SAP CAR Components.................................................................................................................. 20
1- POS DATA Transfer & Audit (POSDTA)...............................................................................20
2- Demand data Foundation (DDF)...................................................................................... 21
3- Unified Demand Forecast (UDF).......................................................................................22
Unified E2E Processes with UDF...............................................................................22
Key Features of Analyze Forecast............................................................................23
Decomposition............................................................................................................... 23
Adjust Forecast...............................................................................................................23
4- Omnichannel Inventory Availability & Sourcing...............................................................24
5- Omnichannel Pricing & Promotions (OPP).......................................................................26
Benefits............................................................................................................................. 26
6- On Shelf Availability (OSA)............................................................................................... 27
Overview.......................................................................................................................... 27
SAP Customer Activity Repository (CAR) and its applications
It provides:

 A unified view on sales, inventory and demand.

 An omnichannel retailing foundation
 An integrated planning & predictive platform
 Analytics& can serve analytical applications

High Level Solution Architecture

Retail Model

Overview SAP CAR

 1- SAP Promotion Management for Retail
SAP Promotion Management for Retail leverages the master data, sales
analysis, and predictive algorithms within SAP CAR to enable retailers to
collaboratively plan promotions in line with unique customer preferences
across channels.

SAP solutions integrate merchandising and marketing users on a common

platform for managing pricing and content holistically.

Promotion Management for Retail allows vendors to propose trade funds or

offers to the consumer that may be automatically forecasted and executed
through the retailers planning & execution systems.
Process Flow

Benefits:
 Design promotion pricing and offers to in line with customer
preferences and financial objectives
 Leverage vendor funding to maximize margins from trade fund
proposal through collection and settlement
 Preview promotion presentation across media types such as print,
digital, web, poster, and coupons
 Create what-if simulations to predict financial performance and
optimize
 Integrate approved promotions through POS/channel, advertising, and
supply chain

Implementation Consideration
The following points may be relevant when thinking about implementing SAP
PMR

 Master Data – consolidate, cleanup & archive master data. It is

replicated to the DDF component of SAP CAR in addition to the SLT
replication for POSDTA.
 Enhancements – although SAP PMR has a good coverage of the
Campaign & Promotion processes, there are areas where custom
enhancements are necessary, e.g.
  Calendar functionality
 Mass maintenance
 Vendor funds & promotion cost prices in foreign currencies
 Custom fields (during replication as well as offer maintenance, etc.)
 Master Data & Price change Notifications
 Usability -SAP UI5 Enhancements
 Unified Demand Forecast – start planning early for the use of UDF, do
not switch it on and expect it to produce stellar results immediately
and unsupervised.
 Consider two years‘history and the mapping of past promotional
activities to DIF‘s.
 PIM/DAM Integration – it is trickier than you would think and most
often, the integration efforts & timeline are underestimated.
 Personalized Targeted Offers – leaflets are going to be a thing of the
past. Think about how you would create & communicate personalised
targeted offers to a target group or individual consumers going forward

Promotional Planning & Calendar (PPC) Overview

SAP PMR supports most aspects of the end-to-end promotion planning&
execution processes; it doesn’t provide any native capabilities for the
common planning & budgeting process requirements.

The PPC Add-On to SAP PMR aims to complement the functionality of SAP
PMR and provides retailers with the ability to plan and execute their
promotional campaign initiatives
 2- Merchandise Planning
Like location planning, merchandise planning is used to create a more
detailed structure for higher-level strategic guidelines. Operative processes
such as reporting or allocation are hardly used in merchandise planning. The
merchandise category hierarchy is used in the planning process but the
merchandise itself is not looked at in detail. Therefore, merchandise planning
does not extend to product level. Other important planning levels are the
distribution chain, the season, the purchasing group and, to some extent, the
price margins.

Solution Overview
 Plan all channels in one solution: retail, e-commerce, & wholesale
 Work using a familiar, customizable, Excel-based user experience
 Use best-practices templates and/or build tailored workbooks using a
planning toolkit
 Plan at any level of the merchandise and organizational hierarchies
 Plan top-down, bottom-up, or middle-out
 Create an open-to-buy budget
 Define alerts and exceptions
 Lock cells, columns, & rows
 Utilize “rules of precedence” to control the order & priority of
calculations
 Manage multiple plan versions and history through a versioning
concept
 Access limited to area of responsibility
 Plan flavors of sales: regular sales, promotion sales, & markdown sales
 Support multiple currencies & languages
 3- Assortment Planning
The aim of assortment planning is to create assortments and define which
products are listed for which stores and the quantity of these that should be
allotted to individual stores. Within an article hierarchy you can plan several
levels, for example, product (style), color (variant) or the price band.

Overview Solution
 Select products to sell, where to sell those products, & how much to
buy
 Plan all channels: retail, digital, & wholesale
 Cluster locations using attributes, history, & predictive analytics
 Create an assortment strategy before defining an assortment by
planning the number of customer choices by key attributes (“option
planning”)
 Utilize modules to group and plan products together that are assigned
to the same locations. Group products using any criteria (e.g.,
collections, climate, demographics, display / space, etc.).
 Build assortments based on combinations of carry-over products & new
produc
  Simplify new product planning using placeholder products & reference
products
 Plan sales & purchase quantities
 Use a simple, customizable, & highly-visual user experience
 Manage user access by planning area of responsibility

Assortment Definition
For each merchandise area (any article hierarchy level) define assortments
and assign to stores that have identical dimension values.This assignment
can occur time dependent.

Assortment Type
The assortment type is assortment attributes enable the strategic alignment
of the assortment and its treatment in assortment definition, assortment
planning and procurement to be controlled.

Assortment Dimension
 For each assortment type up to 3 dimensions
 Characteristics values per dimension
 Example assortment type and business type dimensions e,g capacity
level and price level.
Assortment Example
Assortment Planning level
 Period month / Season/ rollout
 Sales organization/ distribution channel
 Segment/assortment
 Product/variant (color, size)

Seasonal Assortment Planning

Assortment Planning - Option plan
Seasonal Assortment Planning – Style/Color Mix
Non-seasonal Assortment Planning – Overview
Merchandise and Assortment Planning Integration
Integration between BI & Retail System

4- SAP Allocation management

SAP Allocation Management manages the distribution of products from
distribution centers to store with special attention to
 seasonal and short to medium lifecycle products (focus on Fashion)
Solution Overview
The solution supports the allocation process by offering following important
predefined business scenarios:

 Plan-, target, or KPI-driven initial allocation

 Automatic forecast-driven in-season fill-in
 In-Season manual push
 Promotional push with capacity optimization
 Promotional buy and multiple logistic units
It gives full transparency into both, upcoming workloads and planned
allocations across the market and down to store and size, as well as
allocation analysis

The solution offers best of breed retail allocation logic and the possibility to
run the process in a highly automated and system-supported way.

Typical benefits for the customers are:

 Higher profit by reducing markdowns, out of stocks and store-to-store

movements
 High automation level freeing up time for business-critical tasks
 Faster processing and inventory turn

It uses capabilities of Customer Activity Repository, such as

 Unified Demand Forecast (on single product or product/color level)

 Size curve analysis (down to store or cluster, for automatic size break-
down)
 Store clustering
 Real-time inventory (including stock in transit)

Business Scenarios
 5- Fraud Management
Fraud Management for Retail leverages standard SAP software solutions and
CAR-based applications to assist with the detection of fraudulent behaviours
amongst the volumes of sales, inventory and purchasing data that is being
generated on a daily basis within a retail organization.

Common Fraud Scenarios

 Cash Fraud – Differing amounts collected from Cash register to
Deposits in Bank
 Returnable Packaging – falsely returning packaging without the
physical receipt of goods
 Discounts granted outside of regular hours
 GILT – Goods Lost in Transit
 Wardrobing -Purchasing products for short-term use with the intent to
return the item
 Skimming – sale without recording the sale
 Sweet hearting& Reverse Sweet hearting – a sale to contribute to a
sales person’s targets But returned in another store
 Other Inventory Fraud patterns
SAP CAR Components

1- POS DATA Transfer & Audit (POSDTA)

Functional scope contained in CAR is essentially identical to POS Data
Management. POS Data Transfer & Audit within CAR does not require BW/BI
Content anymore like POSDM.
  Prepares data for subsequent processing by performing master data
checks and eradicating simple errors such as duplicate transaction
numbers or missing transaction numbers
 Customer and Channel harmonization
 Provides access to transactional data for sales audit (POS Workbench)
 Aggregates transactional data and transfers it to follow-on systems,
such as SAP Retail, Forecasting and Replenishment,
 Provides access to real-time, non-aggregated transaction data
 Support for Season Determination by Inclusion of retail fashion season
information that integrates with SAP Fashion Management (such as the
season year, season, fashion collection, or fashion

2- Demand data Foundation (DDF)

Demand Data Foundation (DDF) is a module in SAP Customer Activity
Repository, which includes a reusable data layer that supports the planning,
analysis, and forecasting required by different business processes.

 DDF manages master data such as products, locations, product

hierarchy, location hierarchy, offers, or prices.
 DDF acts as a liaison between the consuming applications installed on
top of SAP Customer Activity Repository and the modules within the
repository that provide the analysis, modeling, and forecasting services
like Distribution Curve or Location Cluster.
 DDF is also a prerequisite for Unified Demand Forecast (UDF). UDF is
the module in SAP Customer Activity Repository that provides the
demand modeling and forecasting services. UDF requires that DDF is
installed and fully configured.
 DDF provides integration with SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) to
support the inbound of historical sales data for the following data types
(Consumption Data, POS Data, Inventory Data, Sales Orders).
 Additionally, DDF provides the integration to SAP Marketing Cloud to
retrieve e.g. Target Groups to be assigned to an Offer created in SAP
PM.
 3- Unified Demand Forecast (UDF)
Unified Demand Forecast (UDF) is an advanced statistical forecast using ML
algorithms.

UDF combines strengths of various forecasting methods to supply predictive

information to all Retail applications. This includes SAP Promotion
Management for Retail, SAP Assortment Planning for Retail, SAP Allocation
Management, SAP Forecasting & Replenishment and all future consuming
applications on the SAP Customer Activity Repository.

SAP HANA gives the appropriate technology base to run ad-hoc simulations
with in-memory performance.

 Calculates the impact of historical factors that influence demand like

promotions, calendar events, seasonality or price elasticity, then uses
Bayesian statistics to fill in the gaps of knowledge of what happened in
the past.
 Calculates a forecast per product / location / channel / promotion / day–
flexible multichannel data model is introduced, Intraday results
possible
 Supports what-if forecasting capabilities to compare multiple scenarios,
or production forecasting capabilities for ongoing/analytic access
 Visualization tools and apps available

Unified E2E Processes with UDF

Key Features of Analyze Forecast
 Visualize the forecasts provided by UDF, which gives greater visibility
into factors that influence demand
 Get better understanding how the history is explained in relation to
DIFs, pre-processing findings (e.g. outliers) and other components
 Get better understanding how the forecast is calculated based on the
determined model and in relation to future DIF occurrences
 Select forecasts by product, location, or direct link access (e.g. other
FIORI app)
 Display information by channel
 Share information on analysis results via mail, pdf.

Decomposition

Adjust Forecast

 Key features of this Adjust Forecast app are:

 Cross linked from UDF Analyze Forecast app.
 Forecast correction on different assignment levels (products, product
hierarchy nodes, locations, location hierarchy nodes).
 Relative, additive and absolute corrections.

 Provide demand plan (final forecast) service for other processes like
Replenishment.
 Demand plan considers original UDF forecast, forecast corrections and
external forecast.
  Forecast corrections are not considered in forecast calculation. There
will be no learning effect in forecast calculation!

4- Omnichannel Inventory Availability & Sourcing

CAR is the central hub for article availability information for all channels

 Availability requests for DCs, stores and vendors

 Multiple API’s provided to check article availability in CAR (taking
eligible sources into account)
 Rough stock indicator (traffic lights) in a webshop(out-of-the-box
integration with Hybris Commerce)
ATP information in CAR

 DC availability is based on ATP calculation in ERP (time-series

information), while stores availability is based on inventory visibility in
CAR (current stock information)

Temporary reservations

 Ensure data consistency by using temporary reservation as placeholder

until ERP order is created
 Increase performance by using temporary reservation as placeholder
until next ATP run for DCs

Smart update logic

 DC availability snapshot update by parallelized ATP run in ERP Retail

(full & delta)
 Store availability update by real/near-time POS & SD sales order & ERP
stock upload
 5- Omnichannel Pricing & Promotions (OPP)
With the new Omnichannel Promotion Pricing Service, SAP provides a
solution to ensure correct and consistent effective sales prices in all sales
channels along with the ability to introduce new pricing rule types with low
implementation effort across all sales channels.

 Central price and promotion repository containing the price and

promotional values and rules needed for correct sales price calculation
in all sales channels and supporting a defined set of rules (e.g. bonus
buy types/ mix ‘match, customer specific prices)
 Promotion Pricing Service provided by SAP that calls into the price and
promotion repository to calculate the effective transactional price for
the end-customer
 Price and promotion repository and promotion pricing service can be
deployed locallyor can be called via web-service (centrally)
 Provide an integration with SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP ERP Sales
Order

Benefits
 Increase customer satisfaction and customer loyalty by having
consistent price and promotion information available at all touch points
 Increase revenueby higher customer satisfaction and higher customer
loyalty
  Rapidly implement new marketing initiatives and promotional offer
types in all channels
 Save costs due to low implementation and low test effort for the
retailer when introducing new pricing/offer rules

6- On Shelf Availability (OSA)

The OSA algorithm considers the sales of a product at a specific store.
This algorithm extracts the sales transactions from POS Data Transfer and
Audit transaction data. Then, the algorithm analyzes the length of each
sales interval between two subsequent sales of that product. Typically,
long intervals indicate potential on-shelf availability issues.

Overview
 Using the analytical processing of OSA, you can determine past out-of-
shelf situations.
 This information can be used to determine hotspots of out-of-shelf
situations and to determine appropriate measures to improve the on-
shelf availability in your stores. By continued observation of the KPIs
that can be built on top of the OSA results, you can measure the
success of the realized measures.
 Using the OSA monitoring for operational processes, you can receive
real-time alerts for products that probably have on-shelf availability
issues. Employees can react to these alerts by either refilling the shelf
with products or triggering other appropriate activities.
 Additionally, you can use the OSA module together with the UDF
module to generate intraday demand forecasts for your products