A Look at the SAP Commerce v1811 Release
SAP has released v1811 (v6.9 under the old Hybris nomenclature) of its SAP Commerce (formerly SAP Hybris) platform, adding key features promising to “boost efficiency and deliver a faster personalized experience to customers”. A large part of these iterations and enhancements are related to new integration capabilities with other SAP solutions, helping to provide a true end-to-end customer experience.
Let’s look at some of the new features in this release:
Backoffice Product Content Management – v1811 adds a ‘Welcome Dashboard’ to Backoffice PCM that provides insightful analytics on the product data. Data Quality Coverage shows the number of products in each quality range with filters to dig deeper into the product data quality. Product Approval statistics show the percentage of products in each approval status. The Collaboration component shows the active product workflows and tasks pending with users. This is a very useful tool for Product Managers to get an overall view of their product data and take corrective measures.
SAP Integrations – Two important SAP integrations brought in by this release are SAP Customer Data Cloud (formerly Gigya) and SAP CPQ (formerly CallidusCloud). Customers can now register and login through SAP Customer Data Cloud. Their profile and consent management can be handled centrally paving the way for GDPR compliance. SAP CPQ integration introduces a SaaS based Configure, Price, Quote functionality. Buyers can submit a quote containing configurable products in Commerce which is replicated to SAP CPQ, where a sales rep can give discounts or make other changes to the quote. The offer is then sent back to Commerce, where the buyer can accept the offer or edit the quote for resubmission. Finally, the quote containing configurable products can be converted to a sales order and sent to the SAP back end. A very useful tool for customers who have complex products and pricing models.
Extension Factory Integration – Extension Factory allows us to use microservices to customize the standard functions of SAP Commerce. Instead of using the traditional approach of writing extensions and add-ons to extend the standard functionality, we can now add and enhance features by binding SAP Commerce events to microservices deployed on Extension Factory. This helps decouple the new features from the core platform and makes upgrades easier.
Accelerators – Interestingly, no new features were added to the core accelerators in v1811, continuing the trend from v1808. Given the popularity of the accelerators, one may be inclined to believe that SAP may be paving the way for the new Javascript Commerce Storefront planned for 2019. Based on SAP Commerce APIs and Angular, this will decouple the storefront from the core commerce platform. This is expected to improve scalability and performance and make it more feasible to have frequent releases.
There are a whole lot of other new features and enhancements given below, that have been introduced in v1811. You can explore them in detail on SAP Customer Experience Help pages (SAP login required):
- Context Driven Services Integration
- Personalization
- SmartEdit
- Promotions Engine and Rules Engine
- Backoffice Framework
If you have any questions about SAP Commerce or how to make the most of these new features, please contact us at info@mcfadyen.com and we’ll be happy to help.
AUTHOR
Sudhanshu Rawat
SAP Commerce Practice Lead
Mcfadyen Digital
Connect with Sudhanshu on LinkedIn
