To state the obvious, 2020 was a tough year for businesses, many of which have been tackling a wide variety of challenges and changes in a short amount of time. Knowing what to prioritize, from risk mitigation, revenue growth, operations optimization, customer experience, and retention can be difficult and add to the complexity. To further exacerbate the current situation, brick and mortar businesses have had to accelerate their focus on digital and omnichannel sales channels to stay relevant and competitive in today’s economy.
The wants and needs of consumers are ever-changing, but their expectations for authentic, personalized experiences are, now more than ever, leading the digital transformation of consumer-facing businesses. To drive repeat business and increase customer loyalty, companies must deliver rich, hyper-personalized, seamless interactions across all channels. Moving away from inefficient legacy systems and business silos by embracing new technologies is one way that businesses can pivot, leverage new capabilities, reduce inefficiencies, and attract new customers.
SELECTING YOUR PARTNER
If your business is new to the digital transformation, selecting an IT partner to help implement technologies may seem daunting. Look for partners with industry expertise offering end-to-end capabilities for project consulting and delivery, software licencing, system integration, application development and outsourcing, cloud hosting, and ongoing support for managed services to eliminate project risks. A holistic approach to selecting the right partner can help ensure successful project implementation while allowing your business to derive full value from your IT investment. Savantis offers a one-stop-shop for solutions created on the world’s leading business software, SAP®. Intelligent Entertainment Suite (IES) by Savantis is built on SAP Commerce and Marketing Cloud as an industry-specific, headless commerce solution that helps businesses optimize their operations, reduce inefficiencies, and deliver a personalized, consumer-grade experience with modern and fully integrated back-office capabilities to streamline business processes and improve bottom line results.
ENTERPRISE GRADE SOFTWARE
IES is, at its core, an extension of the SAP e-commerce platform which utilizes the SAP C/4HANA database and includes the entire, extensive set of SAP standard business logic developed for and used by the world’s leading companies. The IES solution is fully integrated and able to leverage the vast array of SAP standard processes, features, and transaction management. SAP’s powerful processing features, which handle the diverse requirements of more than 437,000 customers in 190 countries, are available in IES, specially developed for the media and entertainment, hospitality, restaurant, and retail industries. While the interface may be customized and developed specifically for the cinema industry, the actual transaction processing is standardized for B2C companies. This increases the speed of development and reliability of the IES solution and expands the breadth of the standard features.
IES can fully utilize SAP Leonardo with features such as conversational AI, machine learning, and SAP Analytics Cloud for Business Intelligence. Integrating SAP Leonardo into IES lets you analyze your data instantly, so that you can rapidly leverage insights, address business challenges, and create new opportunities more effectively.
COMMON CODE AND FEATURES
All channels including web, mobile, POS, kiosk, usher, signage, kitchen display system (KDS), reporting, contracts and billing, cash office, marketing, and promotions use one common set of APIs. Once a feature is developed in the system, it is available across all channels and behaves in the same manner across all of them. Furthermore, IES centralizes SAP standard interfaces through the SAP Process Integrator (PI) to all third-party applications. Using the example of cinema operators, this allows for the rapid development of fully functioning interfaces via APIs with Fandango, Comscore (Swift and Rentrak), as well as signage and projection systems. Features do not need to be developed separately within the individual applications as typically found in other solutions, this seamless integration results in faster development time and considerably less maintenance when a change is required as it only needs to be made in one place. Overall, IES delivers greater efficiency, especially for enterprises that are looking for scalable alternatives to current management software such as Vista.
OMNICHANNEL
By aligning and integrating all channels on the same database, with common APIs and processes, businesses can provide a flexible, seamless, cross-channel experience for both the employee and the customer. Continuing with the cinema example, a transaction started on a kiosk can be easily completed on a POS should the customer want to pay cash, allowing for a consistent experience throughout the customer journey. This ease and convenience of the purchasing process helps to build brand loyalty.
CAPITAL AND OPERATING COST SAVINGS
The IES platform does not require a server or storage systems, representing significant capital and operating cost savings. These savings are not simply one-time; they are recurring as hardware and upgrade costs and server software updates are not required since there is no physical hardware to be concerned about.
The servers in AWS are virtual. Because of the highly cyclical nature of the entertainment, retail, and restaurant industries, server capacity is shared and scaled up or down on-demand to meet changing requirements in response to seasonal shifts in demand. This represents a large operating cost savings and, since the process is automated, reduced IT overhead.
The Android POS, with both staff-facing and customer-facing touch screens, costs less than a smartphone and much less than existing Windows-based POS systems. This hardware is generally more reliable as well and since there is no Windows licensing costs involved, resulting in additional capital and operating cost savings long-term.
MARKETING, PROMOTION, AND LOYALTY
IES can track transactions and build profiles not only for registered loyalty members but also for customers who may wish to remain anonymous. Various algorithms are used to group and associate these transactions and the resulting profiles can then be used to intelligently market to customers across every sales channel and throughout the customer journey. The complete integration of promotions, marketing, and non-member and member loyalty systems creates significant business opportunity to enhance personalization, as compared to competitors. For instance, a poor customer experience can be quickly rectified in the channel where the customer next appears, regardless of whether the customer is a member or not.
ONE SOURCE OF TRUTH
Unlike other solutions which have separate databases for operations, head office, and data warehouse, IES utilizes the same HANA database for all these functions. This is possible without affecting performance due to the platform’s use of the SAP-developed fast in-memory database computing. The key advantage of this is that each transaction only exists once, so there is no upload to head office. This means that the same identical records are being used for all purposes, both transactional and reporting, thus eliminating the need for upload and reconciliation.
USER MANAGEMENT INTEGRATED TO HR
IES greatly reduces administrative tasks as it pertains to both user management and employee discount maintenance. The platform is integrated with SAP Success factors, so all on-boarded employees are instantly added to IES with their appropriate security access set by function and location. Similarly, off-boarded employees have their access immediately rescinded. Employee benefits and discount privileges are also maintained as part of this process, which requires no additional steps from the manager beyond the normal HR processes.
MONITORING, BACKUP, SECURITY, VIRUS, RANSOMWARE, AND DISASTER RECOVERY
IES has fully configured user access to all security features and modules. Device access to the system is centrally controlled, meaning users cannot use their own device to access the system. AWS and SAP best practices are used in configuration and prevention of virus and ransomware attacks. A hot standby main system database is maintained and is always available for automatic fail-over, and database snapshots are taken and stored every 15 minutes. The entire IES system is monitored using Dynatrace. This monitoring – from POS, across the network, to application servers and database, for both performance, integrity, error, issue, or lack of performance – is automated and any issue is automatically logged and reported to the support team.
To learn more, visit intelligent-entertainment-suite.
Intelligent Entertainment Suite is now available on the SAP® App Center.
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