WALTHAM, Mass. -- SAP AG, the leading vendor of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, has let rivals such as Siebel Systems Inc. and Oracle Corp. get big headstarts in developing software that can automate sales, marketing and customer service operations for users. But SAP finally plans to release a long-promised set of customer relationship management (CRM) applications in mid-December.
At a press conference here yesterday, SAP executives said five CRM packages are due to ship next month. Those include sales force and field service automation applications, call center management software and separate e-commerce products. The e-commerce software supports online sales to businesses or consumers and allows customers to check the status of their order and its shipment via the Web.
Until now, the only CRM products announced by SAP were a product configurator and call center software tailored specifically for telephone companies.
Hasso Plattner, SAP's co-chairman, acknowledged that the German vendor struggled with the broader CRM offering. "For some time, SAP was preparing for this [market] without knowing exactly where the journey was going," Plattner said.
But yesterday's announcement was "the starting point for a rollout campaign that we'll take to every large customer we have," Plattner added. SAP hopes to sell at least $200 million worth of the new applications next year and expects the CRM product line to become "the major driver for our software and consulting revenues" during 2001, he said.
Plattner and other SAP executives said the CRM applications should be able to compete head-to-head with rival products from Oracle and San Mateo, Calif.-based Siebel. But for users who plan to be early adopters, SAP's biggest selling point is the promise of an integrated system that combines the sales, marketing and service packages with its flagship R/3 ERP software and other add-on applications for data warehousing and supply-chain planning.
"Across the board, our strategy is extremely focused [on SAP]," said Ed Toben, CIO at Colgate-Palmolive Co. in New York. "This is complicated stuff, and you have to do anything you can to simplify it."
Colgate-Palmolive is helping SAP design a follow-on CRM application for doing joint planning of product promotions with the retailers that sell the toothpaste and other consumer goods the company makes. Toben said he expects that package to be ready for initial use in Colgate-Palmolive's U.S. operations by next spring. He also is looking at installing SAP's sales force automation software but not until Colgate-Palmolive finishes upgrading all of its business units to a new version of R/3 later next year.
The long-term plan is to tie all of SAP's applications together so that Colgate-Palmolive's business activities can be planned, executed and then analyzed in a continuous cycle, Toben said. Doing that now "is cumbersome," he added.
Dow Corning Corp. currently is using sales force automation software from another vendor, identified by sources as Siebel, in a limited installation. But CIO Harry Ludgate said the Midland, Mich., maker of silicon materials plans to switch to SAP's new software over the next year or so to avoid the headache of trying to integrate applications from multiple vendors.
"We were waiting to see enough evidence from SAP that they wanted to get into this space and develop a competitive product," Ludgate said. "Before, it wasn't guaranteed that that was going to come to pass. Now, I think there's abundant evidence that it will."
But the big challenge for SAP will be to get more users to think of CRM applications as part of a bigger enterprise application picture and not just as stand-alone products, said John Hagerty, an analyst at AMR Research Inc. in Boston. "SAP has to get people to think about [CRM] in their terms,'' Hagerty said. "Right now, I still think it's still looked at as separate pieces."
