In-house SaaS Solution based on SAP
SAP Solution Assessment & Advisory
A Fortune 500 CPG company in the USA set itself the goal to become a world-class
franchise towards its retail customers. To achieve that, it needed help designing
an in-house Software as a Service (SaaS) offering for Direct-Store-Delivery (DSD)
processes that it would then offer its 100+ affiliated distributors. As advisors
to the Director of IT strategy, Vigience visited potential target users and vendors
in order to assess the technological alternatives. Vigience outputs included mutually
agreed upon assessment criteria and results, unified architecture comparisons and
detail reports that culminate in the "Vigience Quadrant" for decision making.
The Challenge
- Vigience's client faced increased demands for a unified service experience from
the very large retailers that sold its products. However, in order to enable its
distributors to comply, it required a parallel investment by most of them into the
same type of IT capability
- Instead, the client embarked on a shared service and shared IT platform strategy
and issued requests for information (RFI) to potential IT vendors. This helped to
determine an IT strategy that included SAP at its core but would act as a multi-tenancy
SaaS offering towards our clients distributors
- However, most ISV's solution proposals for Direct-Store-Delivery (DSD) solutions
hooking up to SAP looked similar and they all claimed similar capabilities. Vigience
was asked to "look under the hood" and thus help identify a single solution and
vendor
The Solution
- Vigience developed an catalog of assessment criteria specifically tailored to the
client's needs. This measured the items such as the functional fit in more specific
detail, how future-proof the solution is to accommodate future change, how mature
it is today, and how well the SAP integration is done
- Following the vendor interviews, the software architectures by the different vendors
were harmonized so that everybody could compare apples with apples. This included
some editorial on particular strengths and potential weaknesses
- The results were discussed with the client's own IT experts and management in order
to achieve a consensus-based recommendation
The Result
- Vigience, the client's architects and managers, as well as the management consultants
involved all agreed on every vendor's strength and weaknesses and were thus able
to jointly recommend one solution for implementation