Most executives are aware that generic business software creates a foundation that tackles the basics of running a business during constant business change, economic uncertainty, and market volatility. But Â鶹ԭ´´ customers also understand the value of extending their digital strategies withÌý. They are tailoring processes and codifying reporting and analytics to become more efficient, cost-effective, and compliant in terms of employee and customer expectations.

Below is a snapshot of how Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions cater to the unique needs of specific industries and subindustries.

Wholesale Distribution: Unleashing the Potential of Negotiations

Negotiating better agreements is critical for wholesale distributors when driving savings, increasing profitability and margins, and fostering customer and supplier relationships. But it’s still an intricate function of various partners, extensive information, and complex calculations.

With a comprehensive solution such as theÌý, distributors can increase control of the negotiation lifecycle, simplify processes, and gain insights into possible enhancements for profitability. Real-time simulation and analysis of the impact of any actively negotiated deal give distributors the visibility to strike an agreement that protects their profitability, lowering the cost of goods sold through a streamlined, closed-loop process.

Fashion Retail: Redefining the Purpose of Brick-and-Mortar Stores

For fashion retailers, the new norm of mask wearing, social distancing, and controlling the number of employees and consumers in one location is particularly challenging, considering their high-touch nature. However, with the right business model, they may create a mobile-responsive, integrated service that delivers a consistent, reliable, and safe digital experience across all devices and channels.

For instance, available on premise or through the cloud, theÌýÌýallows retailers to support an authentically omnichannel consumer experience. The solution extension enables our customers to control their worldwide outlets centrally. With scanners, scales, kiosks, vending machines, and other peripherals and storefronts, fashion retailers can acquire the real-time visibility and transactional capabilities to provide a seamless and personalized shopping experience.

To succeed with this omnichannel retail model, fashion brands deliver a diverse, dynamic array of products that consumers want throughÌý. It replaces spreadsheets and e-mails to deliver a single version of correct and complete master data to all users – leading to lower costs, informed decision-making, and timely response to market change.

Furthermore, no matter how sophisticated the brick-and-mortar model for retail becomes, fashion brands still need to mitigate an ever-present risk: revenue loss. TheÌýÌýfacilitates an advanced approach to distinguishing potentially fraudulent activities from irregularities, such as business process issues, gaps in employee training, or cases of deception. In return, our customers are eliminating time-consuming and error-prone manual reporting methods and empowering their stakeholders to understand anomalous data better to control and prevent loss on their own.

Agribusiness: Widening Slim Margins with Insight and Efficiency

Agriculture’s economic fragility is a concern across the industry. For years, weather disasters, a trade war, and commodity pricing below production costs have placed tremendous stress across the value chain. And with today’s fluctuating demand across all forms of grocery and food services, agricultural futures are becoming more uncertain.

Although the same stress is felt across the entire industry, virtually every category of farming is governed by distinct regulations and best practices when responding to dynamic market shifts. The needs and requirements of running a dairy farm, for example, are vastly different from those of a grower running an orchard.

Â鶹ԭ´´ understands that reality and offers four unique solution extensions to aid customers as they address issues that are vital to their long-term continuity:

: Designed for farm management operations, the application facilitates everything from planning and planting to growing and harvesting. It addresses the daily need for information and visibility among field managers, supervisors, and workers while delivering crucial analytics to senior executives.

: This integrated solution helps manage complex processes and relationships between buyers and growers of perishable products, such as fruits and vegetables. Â鶹ԭ´´ Grower Management for Perishables establishes a contract setup and a wide array of farming, logistics, and accounting services that assist all players in efficiently and profitably fulfilling commitments.

: The application streamlines and optimizes processes, from raw milk reception to processing finished products. Dairy farmers can use the technology to streamline operations, turn real-time data into revealing insights, and improve performance and competitiveness.

: With data-driven technology embedded, this application enables meat, poultry, or fish businesses to simplify the storage, processing, and flow of information and insight across the organization. The entire meat or fish value chain can oversee food-processing functions in ways that help ensure quality products are delivered to store shelves to meet the needs of every consumer that wants them.

Capital-Intensive Industries: Creating Lasting Value for Customers and the World

Capital-intensive industry segments – such as utilities, oil and gas, manufacturing, mill products, mining, transportation, chemicals, engineering, and construction – are taking on a new life of their own as they help create livable homes, towns, and cities running on sustainable energy. Delivering on this promise requires intelligent solutions for energy generation; storage, water, and waste management; and energy grids efficient enough to keep up with fluctuating demand and inspire consumers to generate their own power.

Â鶹ԭ´´ customers are realizing this goal by tapping into accurate, up-to-the-minute transactional data to manage complex assets, maximize uptime, and improve responsiveness to changing circumstances. TheÌýÌýunifies and streamlines data governance to improve maintenance planning, reduce asset downtime, increase productivity and profits, and support compliance and safety. A smooth exchange of trusted master data is also facilitated with business partners through mobile apps and devices, across cloud and on-premise applications and services.

To keep consumers engaged in this vision of a more sustainable world, utilities are no longer merely providing an online presence with basic account functions and a call center. They are interacting with consumers on the Web and through mobile apps by using theÌý. The tool provides a user-friendly engagement platform with self-service capabilities that serve as a starting template for intuitive, multichannel experiences.

Meanwhile, from an operational perspective, connecting asset lifecycle management with digital technology fosters enterprise collaboration and data-driven decision-making. Controlling engineering information, work processes, and risk allows firms to improve efficiency and time to production for their capital projects and operations.

´¡ÌýÌýopens the door to a more intelligent approach to capital projects and operations. The add-on integrates structured engineering data with unstructured information, including computer-aided design drawings, models, technical specifications, user manuals, maintenance records, and service contracts. Plus, it gives businesses the control they need to handle engineering documents, work processes, and risk across the distributed enterprise, which enhances decision-making and agility while reducing costs.

The solution extension add-on for Â鶹ԭ´´ Extended ECM also supports role-specific workspaces to increase operational efficiency with aggregated content, data, people, and tasks related to a common business function, project, or use case. Content is seamlessly available to employees who need it, when they need it and governed automatically and transparently according to current policies.

Media and Entertainment: Unifying Rights and Royalties with Intelligence and Clarity

The use of disconnected spreadsheets, generic applications, and bolt-on technologies can create a dangerous landscape when competing against massive global players and emerging competitors – most of whom are offering content. Content distributors need a single point of truth to control their rights and royalties while gaining the trust of their consumers and network of creators, licensors, and publishers.

Consider the occasion when distributors negotiate their right to exploit new content. A core ofÌýrights and royalty intelligence and clarity, supported byÌý, enables distributors toÌýprove their financial viability, platform strength, and audience growth. The solution extension consolidates multiple sources of truth to just one enterprise system to create legal-approved contracts, acquire rights, move content to production, and trigger royalty payments based on a schedule.

Impactful Digital Transformation Is Within Reach for Your Business

This series has covered howÌýÌýcan help companies address unique needs across functional areas and distinct industry requirements. Â鶹ԭ´´ customers embrace our portfolio of solution extensions to simplify IT complexities while reducing their risk, accelerating business change, and futureproofing their digital investments.

Learn more about Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions at .

In boardrooms all over the world, the desire for more strategic spend management and resilient supply chains has never been stronger. To avoid the disruption of operational vulnerability and limited access, executives are restructuring their value chain operations end-to-end, from the first buying interaction to final delivery.

For many Â鶹ԭ´´ customers, fueling such a transformation calls for technology — such as — that closes every process gap and optimizes efficiency and productivity. Most importantly, they must be well-positioned to deliver outcomes that bring stability when everything seems uncertain.

Mining Optimal Levels of Process Performance and Efficiency

Although many businesses have acquired data-driven, market-savvy, diverse partnerships and a new mindset from the last disruption, the next one will unlikely follow the same rules and trajectory experienced before. Consumers may react and behave differently as they either tire or adapt to the situation. Meanwhile, employees could have adopted unique schedules and practices that set the right balance between their work and lifestyle commitments.

For most procurement and supply chain organizations, this reality brings higher risk and vulnerability to customer experiences, business model performance, and policy and regulatory compliance as well as rising operational costs and less-than-optimal results. But a holistic approach to process management and automation can drive continuous improvement and enterprise efficiency in the face of unexpected change.

Comprehensive process mining, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning capabilities are designed for a moment like this. The facilitates digitalization and automation — and the move to intelligent enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, — to increase visibility and insights into existing processes. In addition to finding, understanding, and remediating variations and deficiencies, Â鶹ԭ´´ Process Mining allows customers to bridge operational gaps by supporting audits, operational improvements, governance and adherence, and risk mitigation.

Running Fast, Transparent Procurement in the Cloud

Moving away from paper-based processes is another critical part of maximizing efficiency and workflow. But even when digital catalogs and portals are used widely in the procurement process, the transaction is not official until the documents are signed in ink.

Gaining these approvals and moving documents seamlessly between departments, suppliers, and customers are deceivingly simple. An inefficient chain of events is often triggered, ranking from locating the right people to sign off the transaction to mailing supplier contracts, statements of work, amendments, confidentiality agreements, and other documents.

Procurement teams have more strategic work to do than handling daunting, administrative tasks.

With the , the execution, flexibility, and security of the sign-off procedures can be accelerated at a lower cost. The application integrates with one of the , creating a secure, automated workflow for electronically collecting information, tracking progress, and obtaining legally binding electronic signatures. In return, data security increases, costs are lower, compliance is stronger, and contract execution is faster.

Another critical part of procurement excellence is digitalizing and automating accounts payable processes on premise or in the cloud.

Using the , customers are meeting payment and compliance deadlines more efficiently, with fewer data errors and lower associated costs. The application provides the visibility necessary to reward vendors with timely payments while taking advantage of discounts, decreasing supplier management costs, and establishing accurate financial reporting. Furthermore, managers can review and approve invoices with their mobile devices, shortening approval cycles, paying vendors sooner, and complying with contracts and regulations better.

Optimizing the Full Supply Chain with Asset Management

As an extension of the procurement process, supply chain operations run best with consistent, real-time master data, supporting the reuse of data models, business logic, and validation frameworks with open integration with third-party products and services. Trusted master data fuels cross-functional analytics to drive performance management and strategic decision-making with an understanding of real-world performance and opportunity.

enables effective asset life-cycle management and maintenance with the creation and control of master data. Manufacturing customers are unifying the management of master data related to their plant and equipment assets, safeguarding enterprise information, and automating processes with machine learning capabilities. Plus, a single version of correct, complete master data and dependable maintenance plans are accessible to all users, speeding up the transition from development to a stable operational state.

By integrating data governance into the supply chain process, the enterprise asset management extension reduces spares and parts expenses while advanced scheduling limits the need for costly, expedited delivery. Increased visibility into maintenance requirements helps ensure that nothing is missed — enhancing safety across operations and removing time-consuming, walk-down audits.

For engineering and construction businesses delivering capital projects and operations, an designed for their unique asset management needs is available for . Process efficiency and effectiveness are improved through access to centralized, accessible maintenance content, boosting productivity and operational control with better reliability and reduced outages. Comprehensive capabilities — such as engineering project-team workspaces, redlining and markup of engineering drawings, and collaborative approval workflows — boost productivity and strengthen operational control with greater reliability and fewer outages.

Addressing Industry-Specific Concerns With Great Attention

While these solution extensions have a significant cross-industry following, Â鶹ԭ´´ also recognizes the unique needs of specific segments. For example, the streamlines the management of complex processes and relationships between buyers and growers of perishable products, such as fruits and vegetables. Contract setup and services for farming, logistics, and accounting assist all stakeholders in negotiating and fulfilling commitments efficiently and profitably.

We also offer a solution extension for farm management operations, which integrates a wide array of agribusiness processes and automatically generates critical financial, quality, planning, and maintenance data. By eliminating the cost of inconsistent data entry, the empowers managers to align their planning, planting, growing, and harvesting strategies with common goals and base decisions on reliable, real-time data.

These solutions are part of a broader portfolio of Â鶹ԭ´´ Solutions Extensions that serve the needs of specific industries with comprehensive functionality and best practices. Supported industries range from agribusiness, retail, and industrial manufacturing to energy and natural resources, financial services, and public services.

Securing an Edge With Effective Spend and Efficient Supply Chains

No business wants to go through another round of the economic uncertainty of a pandemic — and Â鶹ԭ´´ is no exception. However, should it happen, customers can help ensure their spend management practices and supply chain operations are ready for every twist and turn with the support of a wide-ranging portfolio of Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions.

The next installment of this series will discuss how Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions can help companies address unique needs for their industry.

Learn more about Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions at .

The verdict depends on companies having the right technology in place to manage every financial move with accountability, governance, and compliance off site without disruption.

After years of questioning whether their organizations can work effectively remotely, finance leaders finally received their answer less than one month after complying with local stay-at-home orders. CFOs, surveyed by at the end of the first quarter of 2020, realized cost savings that support business continuity and did not negatively impact operations. In response, nearly 75 percent expect to continue with this arrangement permanently with at least five percent of their previously on-site workforce.

Despite the benefits, adopting work-from-home policies is a sweeping shift in the workplace culture and must be treated as so. Finance teams must address the technology and human aspects of swapping physical interactions for online collaboration with the right software and training to optimize business and operational outcomes, as well as their value, without disruption.

Strengthening the Resilience of Everyday Finance Operations

Not a single moment can be lost due to delays in information gathering, response, and action. Finance must lead with cross-functional off- and on-site collaboration to help drive expectations – such as better customer experiences or more flexible and adaptable supply chains – with accurate forecasts, compliant and efficient processes, and data security.

Take, for example, the pressure to close first-quarter financials in the middle of a pandemic with nearly 100 percent of the finance workforce working from home. Some customers have relied on Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions, such as the , to standardize and automate their financial closing processes in order to improve operational efficiency, compliance, and decision-making.

Connecting people, information, and technology with a digital approach to account substantiation and automation enables the continuity of the accounting function. It fosters compliance in a complex regulatory environment and helps finance deliver strategic contributions to the business. More importantly, executives can access real-time performance insights at their fingertips to help navigate the fog of uncertainty and volatility strategically, intelligently, and innovatively.

Integrating Finance Intelligence for the Entire Business

Another critical aspect of running finance processes off site is uniting all data – from finance operations and accounting to treasury, compliance, risk, planning, and analysis. By expediting and simplifying the transaction integration process, CFOs can drive down costs and boost efficiency with greater intelligence and agility.

The is designed to deliver such an advantage by accelerating the integration of third-party enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and Â鶹ԭ´´ solutions. The technology connects and normalizes transactions from any source in real time, increases visibility into non-Â鶹ԭ´´ operational details, and streamlines the implementation of capabilities.

Securing a Diverse Landscape of Finance Data

As long as data collection and use continue to surge, finance organizations will remain accountable for compliance with various regulations concerning personal information – covering everything from security to individual rights for data removal. As this data is shared beyond the boundaries of the physical office, data protection and governance will only become more critical.

The is helping customers support the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and other data protection mandates. With the power of machine learning, customers can streamline their governance of growing requirements, protect personal data, and safeguard business interests. Managing the use of data is also greatly enhanced through the automation of data subject access requests, data-flow capture, and sophisticated analytics and reporting.

Simultaneously, finance teams must balance the need to give business partners ready access to enterprise data and protect valuable intellectual property and sensitive corporate information across industries, countries, and regions.

The helps achieve this balance by maximizing existing instances of Â鶹ԭ´´ applications and providing real-time, secure, attribute-based access to enterprise data. A dynamic authorization logic helps ensure access control policies are automatically followed, and advanced auditing functionality facilitates continuous monitoring and documentation of regulatory compliance.

A certain level of risk is unavoidable when managing data access; otherwise, business productivity could be unreasonably limited. However, this does not mean that controls need to be manually driven and time-consuming.

With the , CFOs can see the financial impact of access risk for business processes and transactions and enable a risk management strategy that suits the organization. The technology supports the ability to detail and summarize the monetary value of access violations for a true picture of a company’s exposure with predictive analytics.

Turning Ordinary Transactions Into Extraordinary Intelligence

Adopting a new approach to invoice, order confirmation, and delivery notes processing along with transforming accounts payable presents a unique opportunity to turn those transactions into business intelligence. Meanwhile, digital capabilities, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), accelerate these tasks to meet deadlines with greater accuracy and less risk.

Many customers depend on the to set the foundation for this intelligent edge. It digitalizes and automates accounts payable processes, allowing finance teams to manage and speed invoice processing and workflows while supporting compliance with national and international regulations. These capabilities can help meet compliance deadlines, reduce data errors and associated costs, while improving financial visibility and reporting. Plus, CFOs can reward vendors with timely payments while taking advantage of discounts and lower supplier management costs.

By ensuring this transactional data is of high quality, the entire company benefits from efficient and effective processes and better decision-making to uncover and maximize new sources of revenue and business value. The provides the flexibility and unity to turn raw data delivered through billing applications into valuable information for revenue innovation.

By streamlining data mediation, the application helps to reduce process complexity and eliminate the need for expensive point-to-point integration solutions. Finance organizations are equipped to adapt to change through a simple drag-and-drop configuration instead of relying on time-consuming customizations. Plus, they can eliminate data and process duplication, detect inconsistent and faulty data, and prevent revenue leakage.

Rising to the Challenge of Business Continuity

Economic and market uncertainty present significant challenges to business continuity and financial resilience. But sometimes, better ways of getting things done emerge too – which may not have been considered in times of stability.

First, a coherent digital strategy of connectivity and intelligence, data security and governance, and compliance should be established for all critical systems in order to optimize the flexibility of the employee experience. These capabilities are vital during disruption; in better times, they will be the financial leverage CFOs want to sustainably move business forward.

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The next article will explore how Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions can help connect people, things, and assets to form a core ecosystem of intelligence.

With the right connections, clarity, and community collaboration, people can sort through new problems, work in new environments, and adapt their skillsets with resilience and perseverance.

Business leaders that address these realities are the ones building their culture around human experience management (HXM). By continuously listening to their workforce to find and understand gaps, they redesign experiences, processes, and technologies in ways that matter to every end user – from candidates and new hires to recruiters, workers, contractors, and managers.

For many customers, Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions have been a critical enabler that reveals the full potential of the human experience of everyday work. Customers are creating environments that are safe, healthy, engaging, and productive. More importantly, human resources (HR) is becoming their employees’ best ally as they work together to ensure business continuity.

Building Up Employee Capabilities with ResourcefulnessÌý

Whether facing disruption or preparing for one in the future, HR teams must continuously develop their workforce to help ensure the right skills are in place and critical roles are filled. They must ensure employee needs – as well as business requirements – are addressed quickly with ease and clarity.

Consider the painstaking efforts that HR managers must take to help ensure customer service expectations are met by the right shift workers with the right skills working at the right time. The enables customers to deliver on that promise by intelligently forecasting workforce demand and creating schedules that align with business drivers. By integrating this application with Â鶹ԭ´´ or non-Â鶹ԭ´´ business systems, this approach can not only reduce over- and understaffing, but also strengthen compliance with local labor laws.

While the forecasting and scheduling application provides tremendous advantages that the entire workforce and customer base can see, minor experiences can also create an impact. For example, the digitalizes the traditionally manual process of signing paperwork for job candidates, new hires, and promoted employees. Now, documents can be signed in a matter of hours from any device, anywhere in the world. The application securely automates the workflow of processing documents, collects information for the HR system, and obtains legally binding signatures.

Creating a User Experience for Business Continuity

When it comes to business continuity, enabling an agile, engaged workforce is essential. Working in new ways from new locations requires systems and services that are efficient and accessible enough to support employees who are expected to quickly deliver impactful outcomes.

With the , many customers are helping their employees interact with core business applications, which is optimizing user performance and satisfaction. The application provides the data and insight organizations need to identify and replicate best practices as well as locate and remedy process inefficiencies that can inhibit employee engagement or business agility.

Extending Human Experiences Throughout All HR Interactions

Like user experience, HR interactions should become more human-centered when adapting to contingencies and new policies. Employees certainly want to feel safe and equipped to do their jobs well. With the right digital resources in place, HR organizations can help ensure that continuity plans are effective, employees are supported, and organizations remain flexible in the face of unforeseen demands.

For example, the infuses intelligence into HR operations by a streamlining and unifying time and attendance processes business-wide. This approach fosters compliance of labor and payroll regulations while the business mitigates risks and reduces costs without sacrificing critical talent and skills.

The provides a complete view of employee labor activities. This information empowers business leaders to make informed decisions when reducing employee costs, supporting compliance with labor policies, accelerating business execution, and improving the bottom line.

Knowing that life changes in the workforce happen 365 days a year, many Â鶹ԭ´´ customers are also relying on the to oversee such events for U.S.-based employees. The application smoothly integrates with a core HR system of record and providers’ systems, giving employees access to their information without delay and errors.

The is further simplifying the process of making necessary changes for an employee or the entire team. With a central digital employee record, enabled by secure document storage, file synchronization, and document generation, HR leaders are integrating HR document management across the enterprise to ensure processes remain compliant – saving time, improving transparency, and better engaging employees.

Shaping the Future of Work with Valuable Learning Opportunities

With the degree of change happening in the current landscape, employees must be ready to tackle the new risks and opportunities that lie ahead. Unfortunately, they typically have less than a half-hour per week available to focus on reskilling, upskilling, and organizational transformation.

Business leaders can overcome this hurdle by providing targeted, high-quality content that can be consumed without disturbing the flow of daily work. In fact, they can give their learners access to more than 500 curated learning paths that have been developed based on the latest brain science to maximize engagement.

provides an intelligent digital experience platform that offers personalized learning experiences with curated, top-quality content, such as productivity, collaboration, leadership, digital transformation, business essentials, and technology development. Additionally, aÌýÌýis available to help employees better understand the use of virtual teams and community-based collaboration and acquire the operational resilience to overcome the implications of the recent pandemic.

Taking Charge of Change Calls for a Human Experience

At the core of every employee experience is the desire for interactions that are profoundly human and personal. No matter what is happening in their business, employees want to know that they are protected, productive, and assured that their work has purpose and impact.

Understanding this social contract with the modern workforce, Â鶹ԭ´´ is always inspired to innovate and delivers applications that equip customers with the capabilities they need to keep moving forward while taking care of the people that define their success.

The next article will explore how Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions can help ensure investment in intelligent ERP, uniting business intelligence into one source of truth while reducing data entry and processing costs.

Learn more about Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions atÌý.

What is missing? Innovation that stimulates differentiation and growth by uniting the needs of the business with those of the customer.

Successful customer experiences are the ones that resonate with people’s deepest instinctive behaviors. Humans have always sought out authenticity, convenience, and trust, which is directly tied to an inherent desire for a meaningful life. Any interaction that does not carry this emotional value signals a reason to walk away empty-handed.

Although the customer experience is undeniably human-centered, technology is shaping a new era of authentic engagement. Businesses now have access to Big Data insight that can help them understand their customers and predictive analytics in order to sense their needs. Now, with a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning embedded in most solution investments, specific processes, communications, and interactions can be automatically triggered to motivate a new potential sale.

But even with such a diverse selection of technology, there may be moments when some experiences are not as seamless and connected as they should be. This reality is what inspires Â鶹ԭ´´ to continue building and expanding a portfolio of Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions that can help businesses bridge those customer experience gaps.

Growing Importance of Omnichannel Experience and Operations

Whether a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) sale, transactions can be initiated, processed, and completed through any variety of channels. Businesses can support the demands of each touchpoint with standard software. However, the real power of such an omnichannel business model is best realized by centrally consolidating the management and monitoring of all transactions, peripheral devices — such as scales, scanners, kiosks, mobile devices, and printers — and customer interactions.

With this approach, businesses can support the back-end processing of transactions across theÌý, such as:

• Payments: Process all forms of payment, including mobile payments.
• Returns: Save all receipts and make them available throughout the entire store system to streamline returns and prevent multiple returns of the same item.
• Mobile couponing and marketing: Increase revenue with opt-in marketing programs that send customers targeted offers.
• Promotions and loyalty programs:Implement customer loyalty promotions with ease and handle traditional and digital vouchers to reduce errors and potential fraud.
• Digital signage:Use a second monitor at the store-level POS to display customer receipts and promotions.

´¡ÌýÌýcan further support the omnichannel approach in ways that can help increase a brand’s appeal to customers. Businesses can reach customers through a mobile channel, enabling the opportunity to provide personalized services to customers anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Such front-end activities may include mobile payment initiation, self-service scanning, and coupon and discount e-wallets.

For sales and marketing teams, technology can ease the burden of communicating with customers and partners in ways that are unique and resonate across many channels. They can collaborate to create assets and streamline approvals, repurpose and identify digital assets for campaigns, and facilitate asset distribution. Marketers can also gain better visibility into marketing asset statuses, including rights and usage, while automating and controlling brand standards.

For example, a solution gives representatives a single source for quickly acquiring and distributing product and service information, as well as marketing assets, across all channels – in-store, mobile, Web, social, and beyond. A solution enables those communications to be personalized, augmenting the customer experience and making every interaction more productive for sales and marketing teams.

Digital Marketplaces that Build Brand Equity

Online marketplaces are offering a wealth of opportunities for growth and expansion. They capture real-time information that can help businesses better understand and fulfill customer needs. Meanwhile, customers have access to a one-stop shopping experience that is fast, convenient, and transparent.

With the assistance of aÌý, businesses can build, launch, and run a marketplace that strengthens their portfolio of product and service offerings. More importantly, companies can act on insights that energize customer relationships while driving revenue and long-term loyalty.

Motivational, Relevant, Profitable Promotions and Programs

The right promotions and incentivization programs can shorten the sale cycle and keep customers open to returning to the brand in the future. But making sure these strategies remain profitable is an entirely different matter.

AnÌý enables businesses to support, enable, and integrate promotions and programs. They can model, report, and analyze their outcome to calculate rebates, royalties, commission accruals, earnings, and settlements. Plus, profit loss from missed cost recoveries, such as rebate or royalty claim opportunities and overpayment of incentives, can be identified early on.

Process Optimization for a World of Disruption

Nothing is worse than the sale that is almost won. Somehow, there is a breakdown in the experience caused by a lagging process or lost request.

Customers do not have any patience for a transaction process that is less than optimized. They now expect businesses to deliver a seamless experience that reliably meets their expectations – done right the first time, every time.

To help businesses ensure they do not fall victim to the sale that got away, targeted technologies can be integrated into existing sales systems to support specific tasks such as:

• : Assess business processes running within enterprise solutions – such as commerce, marketing, sales, and services – and pinpoint areas for improvement through data-based discovery, analytics, and visual representations.
• : Resolve queries quickly and efficiently by providing both customers and customer-support agents timely access to relevant product information through a self-service portal.
• : Preserve profit margins with a reliable process for validating and executing claims accurately and efficiently to maintain positive supply chain relationships and avoid revenue loss.
• : Bring flexibility, security, and accelerated execution to the customer engagement process with an automated workflow for electronically capturing, storing, and managing legally binding e-signatures with full visibility and control.

Customer Experience that Delivers on Expectations

By leveraging the ever-expanding portfolio of Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions, companies can deliver the trusted, personalized experience that their customers expect – every time. But more importantly, every interaction with a customer is never a wasted opportunity.

Now that’s a customer experience made for everyone.

Next time we’ll explore how Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions can help ensure investment in intelligent ERP can unite business intelligence into one source of truth while reducing data entry and processing costs.Ìý Learn more about Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions atÌý.

But that mindset is only a small part of the bigger evolution story. It is also about digitalizing processes end to end to fundamentally change employee and customer experiences.

The rise of intelligent technologies – from artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and digital twins to augmented reality and the Internet of Things (IoT) – has its advantages. However, businesses cannot discount the potential for additional complexity to be introduced into the IT landscape and rising volumes of data scattered across the enterprise.

Do not be fooled: Overcoming such challenges along the way to becoming an intelligent enterprise has little to do with the variety of technologies being implemented. What matters, first and foremost, is having a business technology platform that serves as a center of gravity for all digital investments and enterprise data.

For Â鶹ԭ´´ customers, the answer to helping ensure that their business technology platform can deliver on that promise is Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions. The diverse portfolio provides solutions that are specially designed for the four pillars of a trusted, complete, and relevant IT landscape: enterprise content management, data management, data protection, and process mining and optimization.

Intelligent Management and Extension of Valuable Business Content

By extendingÌýÌýcapabilities across the company, the business technology platform can address the entire information life cycle – from document and records management to information retrieval and collaboration. Additionally, rigorous information security and support are used to facilitate compliance with data privacy and protection regulations.

Connecting e-mails, documents, and other content to core business processes drives significant changes across a variety of organizations, such as:

Human Resources

Create a digitized and centralized employee document management environment that helps reduce costs and increase internal efficiencies. Businesses can improve their employee experience and productivity by deepening collaboration within project teams and eliminating the handover of information throughout the workforce life cycle – from recruiting and onboarding to compliance with regulatory requirements such as multiple document-retention policies.

Marketing, Sales, and Support

Create more unified and personalized customers experiences across in-store or online channels with consistent brand content. For example, customized promotions and communications can be provided during one channel interaction, then cascaded across the omnichannel customer experience – from brick-and-mortar stores to ecommerce storefronts.

Supply Chain

Lower procurement costs by capturing, scanning, and storing all incoming supply chain content, including unstructured information in delivery notes and e-mails. This information can be used to optimize order-to-procure processes and negotiate better deals with suppliers, compare past prices with real-time invoice information, and uncover more opportunities for dynamic discounting.

Strong Governance Across the Master Data Life Cycle

As long as data-driven business models continue to be created and evolve,Ìý and Ìýwill remain critical to the operation of an intelligent enterprise. Moving intelligence from one application to another across the business technology platform requires considerable visibility into everything from data volume and relevance to connectivity.

AI and machine learning models help deliver migrations that are fast, hyper-efficient, and affordable. The migration process can be automated by capturing and sharing expertise, context, and insights – setting a valuable springboard for decisions on definition, protection, and security as well as business rules and access authorization. Then, data assets can be intelligently reused while traditional information siloes are obliterated.

Data governance capabilities can then be applied to help ensure data quality and readiness before the new solution – such as – goes into production. As a result, businesses can mitigate deployment and operational risks while gaining experience with a controlled, nonproductive digital twin of the solution. In addition, they can switch to central governance before or in parallel with the deployment to keep data clean for the long term.

With a single view of their data, businesses can drive information consistency company-wide – whether the business is handling (EAM) for their facilities or streamlining . The speed and accuracy of processes and analytics increase with the automation of maintaining and distributing master data, integrating it more tightly, and controlling quality and standards. Additionally, compliance with data protection and security regulations strengthens through governed mechanisms for traceable auditing and change management.

Reliable Data Mapping and Protection

Data is an integral part of business operations in the digital economy. Intelligent enterprises fuel success by optimizing the use of data across all interactions with their customers, employees, and ecosystem partners. With capabilities, businesses can use data to spur innovation, help ensure data compliance, mitigate risk, and build trusted relationships.

Data mapping and protection enable decision-makers to better leverage data from diverse sources, both structured and unstructured. This approach strengthens the transparency and power of data analytics, instilling stakeholder trust and confidence in the accuracy, timeliness, security, and compliance of the data used.

Gaining new value from personal and sensitive business data, while helping to ensure its security and permitted use, allows businesses to serve trusted and protected data for actionable insights throughout organizations and with ecosystem partners.

Continuous Optimization of Business Processes

Intelligent enterprises depend on mission-critical processes that are fast, profitable, and agile. By providing greater transparency into process execution,ÌýÌýcapabilities help organizations understand existing processes better – from how they work and where they need improvement to which best practices are most effective.

Sophisticated discovery, analysis, and documentation foster data-based, continuous improvement. Companies can leverage prebuilt content, analytics configurations, and data connectors from line-of-business applications to the business technology platform in order to monitor performance, identify previously unrecognized process weaknesses, and improve process efficiency, quality, and reliability.

Shape Your Future with Simplicity, Speed, and Integrated Intelligence

When combined with Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions, a business technology platform can help companies connect processes and experiences in ways that allow employees to act with integrity and confidence and gives customers a reason to keep coming back.

But more importantly, this approach establishes the connected and intelligent foundation needed to support flexible, agile innovation practices that are tremendously essential to succeeding in the experience economy.

Learn more about Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions atÌý.

Next week’s installment will consider how Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions can take customer experience to the next level by stimulating differentiation and growth.

The demand for high-quality products has given way to pleas for better convenience, more sustainable operations, and faster delivery. Now more than ever, exceptionally curated and trusted experiences are the expectation, as consumer demands evolve with the day and time, demographics, and personal life events.

Staying competitive in today’s fluid and fast-moving experience economy is no easy task. But when Â鶹ԭ´´ customers have artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and other intelligent technologies in their digital arsenal, they become intelligent enterprises that can accurately pinpoint nuanced opportunities for capturing consumer attention and loyalty.

As 10,000 Â鶹ԭ´´ customers already know, adopting these leading-edge digital capabilities is never as easy as picking and plugging in a single solution and walking away. There are multiple layers of complexity across the existing IT infrastructure that must be first simplified. And in every case, this step is worth the wait, thanks to outcomes such as lower risk, accelerated transformation, and future-proofed technology investments.

Next-Level Experiences with a Choice of Complete Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution ExtensionsÌý

With access to more than 90 solutions, over 50 million people have trusted Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions to advance and realize the full potential of every stage of their company’s digital transformation. Â鶹ԭ´´ integrates these strategic, third-party solutions with Â鶹ԭ´´ software to complement existing digital capabilities.

Qualified, tested, validated, approved, and supported, Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions are thoroughly vetted by Â鶹ԭ´´ to help ensure they exactly meet standards for security, accessibility, functional correctness, performance, and scalability. This level of commitment helps ensure that every line-of-business and industry-specific functionality helps connect experiences and operations with intelligence.

For intelligent enterprises, Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions provide much-needed peace of mind. They can connect experiences with operations in ways that drive significant value throughout the consumer, product, brand, and employee experience by elevating the performance of fundamental aspects of leading-edge digital landscapes.

• Business Technology Platform:ÌýAccelerate business operations by digitalizing processes end to end with extensions for enterprise content management, data management, data mapping and protection, application deployment readiness, low-code rapid application development, and business process mining and optimization.
• Customer Experience:ÌýStimulate differentiation and growth with continuous process innovation and delivery of exceptional customer experiences. Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions support relevant capabilities, including incentive administration, paybacks and chargebacks, centralized knowledge base, enterprise resource planning (ERP) data maintenance, and data mediation, as well as management of the commerce marketplace and omnichannel customer experience.
• Intelligent ERP:ÌýUnite business intelligence into one source of enterprise-wide truth while reducing data entry and processing costs. Businesses can digitalize and streamline standard financial management shared services — such as order to cash, financial close, central finance, and transaction replication — while demonstrating compliance with safeguarded data security, access, and interactions enterprise-wide.
• People Engagement: Engage employees through an exceptional experience of meaningful human resources (HR) interactions. Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions can be integrated with existing HR applications — from HR document and records management to benefits optimization, learning, and e-signatures — in order to attract, develop, and keep the right talent.
• Digital Supply Chain and Intelligent Spend Management:ÌýRealize the competitive edge of intelligently connecting people, things, and assets to form a core ecosystem of intelligence. Supply chains and finance operations can take advantage of capabilities based on the Internet of Things (IoT), including digital twinning, as well as capabilities for enterprise asset management and procure to pay.
• Industry-Specific Needs: Address needs that are very much unique to the business and impact operations differently than any other business inside and outside an industry. Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions addresses a broad range of processes and requirements for industries — from agribusiness, retail, and industrial manufacturing to energy and natural resources, financial services, and public services.

In the coming weeks, this series will demonstrate how Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions can help strengthen each of these foundational elements of a digital strategy for delivering experience that employees and consumers will love.

Next week’s installment will offer a deep dive into Â鶹ԭ´´ Solution Extensions for business technology platforms.

Learn more about the solutions at .