With the economic uncertainty present in today's markets, it's increasingly important to have visibility into your workforce and a clear succession plan - ensuring your company never misses an opportunity. Successful companies invest in systems and processes designed to ensure that their employees, contractors, and partners are engaged and have the necessary skills and experience to meet business objectives.

Highly efficient processes to find, develop, and retain the best people and talent allow you to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time on activities and programs that will have a bigger impact on the business.

SAP Business Suite helps deliver greater, real-time insight and visibility across organizations, operational efficiency and effectiveness, and flexibility to achieve HR process excellence and exceptional talent management. As a result, you can identify future leaders, manage their development, and ensure that they are ready to perform when needed. Also, you can automate HR processes, enabling you to focus on strategic tasks, control costs, and increase efficiency and productivity.

Inadequate training and development programs, no visibility into employee performance and potential, and gaps in the successor pipeline can leave you without insight into a valuable resource: your employees. Implications include the inability to develop corporate goals, assess performance and potential, calibrate employee rank, develop individual's skill sets, and link compensation to performance.

You need an appraisal process that allows for tight integration between all talent management applications using one database with the underlying HR data model for all people-related management processes. This is an integrated environment driven by the SAP NetWeaver technology platform. Succession Planning offers SAP Talent Visualization by Nakisa, which includes job architecture planning tools and a nine-box calibration grid with information and performance potential. Employee Development includes analytics delivered with SAP Enterprise Learning that allows you to track and measure learning initiatives and align training objectives with business objectives.

Global competition, unprecedented market and economic turbulence, and rising shareholder expectations are transforming the responsibilities of finance. Your new role: business strategist. Your vision: superior financial performance that leads to financial excellence.

Superior financial performance is achieved when resources, people, and technology are leveraged to focus on your most critical business requirements - decreasing operating costs, driving business performance, and mitigating risks. SAP Business Suite helps deliver greater insight and visibility across organizations, operational efficiency and effectiveness, and flexibility to help you enable efficient and compliant accounting and reporting; streamline operations; and manage payables and receivables.

Inefficient, disparate, and outdated systems drive up costs, cycle time, and errors. The need for compliance, transparency, and efficiency strains complex organizations as they attempt to contain spending and grow globally. Finance departments face high resource demands and high costs to execute AR and AP functions. So how can you reduce the overall finance department and cost structure while streamlining reporting cycles to gain greater automation?

SAP ERP Financials and Shared Services cover end-to-end processes. You can increase automation and coordination of close cycles with SAP General Ledger, which lets you configure multiple customer ledgers, reduce reconciliation times, and automate period-end closing tasks such as accruals and closing entries. You can standardize the close using the Web UI template in the Closing Cockpit, which integrates with SAP Central Process Scheduler. And, the SAP Business Planning and Consolidation offers user-configurable enterprise financial consolidation and reporting.

High-Performing Assets focuses on the processes associated with maximizing returns on a fixed asset, which is generally defined as  anything that brings a stream of value over a period of time, usually greater than one year. Examples include:  Plant equipment, digital media, mobile assets, planes, and buildings. High Performance is achieved when the purchase, construction, operation, maintenance and quality processes are combined to optimize and streamline profitability, performance, and compliance of the asset.

The Baker Report of 2007 identified recommendations that needed to be implemented in the operational processes at global manufacturing plants. Senior management staff needs tools to analyze, monitor, and maintain visibility into these critical operations. Many companies don't have the integrated infrastructure to consistently manage risk, performance, and health, safety, and environmental operations.

SAP's Asset Safety and Compliance scenario supports compliance and mitigates risk by informing stakeholders and keeping people, the environment and assets safe. The integrated closed-loop risk management, KPI monitoring and compliance reporting help you monitor reports and mitigate potential risk. The software offers operational performance metrics that let you drill down into specific data including safety, environment, and resource information. Compliance reports can be sent directly to external authorities. It includes auditable business processes and audit management solutions to plan, manage, and audit EHS audits that meet ISO 19011 standards.

Intense competition. More-demanding customer and shareholder expectations. Geographically dispersed business units. An uncertain economic future. All these global realities are amplifying market pressures on businesses to achieve operational excellence.

Successful businesses achieve operational excellence by creating a dynamic, operationally driven architecture that goes beyond delivering functional efficiency to seamlessly link business processes together. As a result, complete transparency across the entire operational chain is enabled.

SAP Business Suite helps deliver greater insight and visibility across organizations, operational efficiency and effectiveness, and flexibility to help you unify all operations to achieve operational excellence. As a result, your operations can be transformed into a strategic competitive advantage via real-time visibility into the business, high-efficiency execution across all units and geographies, and continuous improvement.

Missed sourcing and procurement opportunities can have a serious impact on your bottom line. The fundamental misalignment between sourcing and procurement represents the biggest barrier to cost savings. Often CPOs have a lack of visibility into spend because of disparate legacy systems and inconsistent and nonstandardized procurement processes.

The Integrated and Sourcing Procurement solution from SAP (SAP E-Sourcing) offers four key tools to help you deliver highly efficient procurement operations. Spend Analytics offers predefined, role-based configurable reports that support data aggregation from SAP and non-SAP data sources. Strategic Sourcing delivers RFX template and auction capabilities including bid optimization and project management. SAP E-Sourcing integrates with SAP ERP (Contract Management), which automates contract creation out of sourcing events. It also ensures that negotiated terms and conditions are applied and used consistently. SAP ERP unifies Operational Procurement and Strategic Sourcing by integrating SAP ERP and SAP E-Sourcing, covering the complete procure-to-pay process.

New forms of competition. Rapidly evolving customer needs. Compliance risks. Disruptive technology. An economy of growing uncertainty. Whether your company builds machines or bakes muffins, these issues are your reality and a threat to your profitability.

Companies choosing to face these challenges by becoming a product and service leader strive to foster continuous innovation and deliver the right products and services fast with superior quality and at competitive prices

Furthermore, best-in-class performers will need to transform their business models to embrace the compelling benefits of a business network as the basis for sustainable competitive advantage. These networks include coordinated networks that enable companies to quickly scale up their production capability profitably, as well as collaboration networks that foster agility and innovation to meet market demands.

Automotive manufacturers are dealing with shifting competition, changing requirements, and a customer base in flux. Disconnected design, procurement, and manufacturing processes lead to loss of time and poor quality products that only decrease revenue. The Integrated Product Development Process from SAP connects product design, component and task sourcing, and production to reduce time to profit.

The SAP solution for Product Design offers an end-to-end gate process for new product initiatives that combines portfolio view and operational project management. It also provides embedded product-centric analytics. The Component and Task Sourcing solution lets you conduct all sourcing activities in direct, indirect, and service categories by automating the creation of requests for information, proposals, quotations, and reverse auctions. The third element of SAP's solution is the Ramp-up to Production, which offers change management from manufacturing back to sourcing and development, while integrating management of engineering, manufacturing, and service bill of materials.

Satisfying the customer is tantamount to your success. But doing so is also more challenging than ever. Not only are customers more demanding and less easily satisfied, they are also looking to the lowest possible price. All the while, you must harness and streamline an evermore complex, global supply ecosystem.

Is it possible to both satisfy the demanding customer and achieve profitability? Forward-thinking organizations are proving the answer is yes. However, shifting from a traditional supply chain system to a global supply network typically requires most companies to rethink conventional business models and IT approaches.

Market leaders that have chosen to adopt a responsive supply network business strategy are achieving significant results, including reduced inventory levels, improved customer in-stock predictability, and overall profitability. By enabling end-to-end business processes, SAP Business Suite helps deliver greater insight and visibility across organizations, operational efficiency and effectiveness, and flexibility to help companies respond faster and smarter to ever-changing market conditions and transition to a responsive supply network.

The consumer products industry faces the challenge of growing business while satisfying global consumer demand. As a retailer or manufacturer, to achieve timely and profitable response to consumer demand, you need to synchronize the demand and supply for optimum inventories. The best way to achieve this is by providing stakeholders with tools to align their different objectives.

Using Collaborative Demand Management, Supply Planning, and Sales and Operation Planning, you can align departments and offer all stakeholders timely information that translates into profitable response to customer demand. By integrating all relevant demand data and processes across enterprise and functional boundaries you can manage the volumes of demand signal data provided by external sources. SAP SCM lets you collaborate, plan, execute, and coordinate the entire supply network.

Customer relationships are seen as a strategic asset. A customer-centric business strategy maximizes customer lifetime value (return on relationship) by focusing on creating customer value, developing profitable long-term relationships with customers and delivering an exceptional customer experience across all customers' touch points.

Discrete industries face several service business challenges, most notably call center issues due to a lack of visibility into customer history, products purchased, and repair details. For supply chain operations, a lack of coordinated systems makes it difficult to execute service parts management, as well as the logistics of returns, in-house repairs and replacement parts. For sales and marketing and financials the lack of integration makes it more challenging for staff to respond to service demands and may cause billing errors or late payments for service parts.

The Business Process Platform built on SAP NetWeaver technology platform encompasses the integrated elements required to address these service challenges including ERP, PLM, SCM, SRM, and CRM. The integrated full service process supports customer service, repair management, returns management, and cross-selling, which lets you address customer needs and requirements as well as the visibility and tools to provide efficient and effective customer service.

Consumer product sales and manufacturing face unique challenges. As promotional campaigns grow more complex, sales teams must serve as general managers, and supply chain coordination becomes key to success. Effectiveness and the ability to measure ROI remain low, and despite increased interest in sales enablement solutions, not all companies that purchase these tools are satisfied with the results. They want to ensure coordinated, relevant programs for customers while empowering their sales teams and integrating the sales and supply chain process to ensure appropriate stock is available during promotions.

SAP Brand Management Analytics lets you leverage historical promotions, shipments and financial data to assess which campaigns are the most effective. Promotion Planning and Funds Management offers real-time adjustments to budgets and promotions, including fact-based analysis to support collaborative planning efforts. With Account Management, you can capture promotion, marketing, and customer-specific supply chain costs for customer profitability and future campaign planning.

The SAP Business Suite application is next-generation software that helps businesses improve processes, reduce costs, and seize the opportunities that inevitably arise -- regardless of whether the global economy is contracting or expanding.