Orlando, USA - 8 June 2002 (PRN): SAP AG (NYSE:SAP) Wednesday announced that it continues to optimize business processes with enhanced integration between mySAP(TM) Customer Relationship Management (mySAP CRM) and mySAP(TM) Supply Chain Management (mySAP SCM). By compressing time lags between customer demand and supplier activities, the tight integration of CRM and SCM on the mySAP.com(R) e-business platform represents a major milestone in SAP's development of adaptive supply chain and connected CRM solutions. The enhanced integration improves productivity and efficiency by helping companies better respond to ever-changing market conditions, maximize revenue opportunities, minimize costs, and improve customer service. Further, these solutions can be efficiently integrated across legacy, third-party, and SAP applications, allowing customers to realize these benefits at a lower total cost of ownership. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE(R) '02, SAP's international e-business conference being held in Orlando, Fla., June 5-7.

"Today we understand better than ever the realistic costs associated with integrating systems within an enterprise," said Karen Peterson, vice president and research director at Gartner, Inc. "Use of a single vendor solution avoids the pitfalls associated with duplication of support resources, multiple training regimens, multiple sources for problem resolution, and the challenges of software upgrades across many vendors found in the best-of-breed scenario. When you can minimize the total cost of ownership issues, and, at the same time, leverage the real value of data and process workflow integration, you can achieve additional benefits of a CRM/SCM solution. Clearly, the challenges of CRM/SCM integration are likely to be greater in a best-of-breed scenario -- which translates to higher costs and risk--both at implementation and on an ongoing basis."

Tightly integrating CRM with SCM enables companies to meet the day-to-day challenges of business planning -- which ultimately begin with insight from customers and prospects -- to effectively drive sales planning to the demand planning. The multi-channel capabilities of mySAP CRM enable customers to effectively configure to order across multiple interaction channels, all with seamless integration to the demand planning and supply chain planning process. The resulting visibility and collaboration within the network effectively aligns an organization's demand to supply, creating a streamlined flow of goods and information to meet customers' changing needs through any customer interaction channel.

The business process integration of CRM and SCM further helps companies manage and service a customer profitably, ensuring that the insights gained from customers in the front end of the business planning process are transformed into profits through planning efficiencies in the supply chain. For example, a tightly integrated CRM/SCM solution allows companies to bring the service management business process to life, promoting the management of everything from call center operations and field service through service delivery and inventory management -- all on a single, coordinated system. By leveraging the tight integration, enhanced business visibility is achieved across the entire service management lifecycle, and the true value of the SAP solution -- found through increased customer satisfaction -- can be realized. Improved customer satisfaction and loyalty are achieved based on the enterprise's ability to make and deliver to promise. This leads to effective communication back to clients through a seamless customer centric business process.

"By tightly networking demand with supply, we enable our customers to minimize time delays, increase inventory turns, increase asset utilization, and, ultimately, increase customer service and satisfaction," said Henning Kagermann, co-chairman and CEO of SAP. "The enhanced SAP solution pulls value from across the demand and supply chains to meet the needs of our customers, who are looking to manage at the revenue level and profitability and not just a quantity level."

mySAP CRM and mySAP SCM enable companies to better meet their customers' requirements by providing CRM-to-SCM integration not possible from so-called best-of-breed solutions. Ultimately, the integration provides higher levels of customer satisfaction while driving down technology management costs.

True CRM/SCM Integration Delivers True Profits

True CRM/SCM integration allows companies to translate fluctuations in the demand chain and changes in market conditions captured in the CRM system into real-time optimization of the supply chain. This is achieved by integrating the campaign and demand planning and the demand and supply planning capabilities of the SCM system. The solution further enables organizations to effectively manage customer expectations based upon the capabilities of an organization's supply network. Within the mySAP.com e-business platform, this integration occurs both at the data level and at the business process level -- assuring improved utilization of resources and more effective planning. These capabilities allow companies to maximize revenue opportunity, and, more importantly, drive higher levels of customer satisfaction.

Business process integration enables companies to manage variability in their demand chain and synchronize their supply chain resources, allowing for a faster return on investment. The functionality reaches into multiple levels of the supply and demand chains with bi-directional visibility and dynamic capabilities. Real collaborative processes, like those enabled by mySAP CRM and mySAP SCM, must be built upon an open technology framework that takes advantage of industry standards such as HTML, XML, and WAP to ensure flexibility and interoperability. SAP solutions also feature a unified architecture that can be tailored to the unique requirements of specific industries and companies.

For more information on mySAP CRM and mySAP SCM, please refer to the mySAP Customer Relationship Management and mySAP Supply Chain Management Fact Sheets, www.sap.com/usa/sapphire/press/factsheets.