How would you do in the Age Test?

In the SAP world the 1990s ushered in the world of SAP R/3, today in 2015 not a lot has changed, the backbone of most SAP solutions is the same, while SAP has announced the arrival of S4/HANA, it will take years for organizations running SAP to migrate to the HANA platform and more importantly for their customers to feel the benefits of faster, better processes.

I was at my Gran’s on Sunday and I noticed an audio cassette on the coffee table.

If like me, you understand the link between the two, you may have also realized ashamedly you are slightly older than you thought. But things have progressed massively since the ’90s.

There are many things that we bid farewell to as we entered the new millennium, including winding back cassettes players, waiting for Teletext to load the football scores or even just going to the library to rent a book.

Enter "The Age of the Customer”.

This report from Forrester assessed the influence on "Competitive Strategy In The Age Of The Customer".

Gartner also recognized the impact:

“Empowered customers are disrupting every industry; competitive barriers like manufacturing strength, distribution power, and information mastery no longer create competitive advantage.”

In this age of the customer, we all expect faster and better products and services.

The successful companies like Amazon and Netflix are customer-obsessed, and setting the benchmark for everybody else, by becoming faster and better.

Uber’s disruption of the taxi industry is just one of the latest examples of breaking free from an old way of thinking.

Right now over half of SAP customers I speak to are dissatisfied with the system’s response times across all components, yet continue to settle for it, presenting a risk of losing out to competitors who have been able to react faster.

So why, in "The Age of the Customer” are some businesses happy to simply accept delays?

Is it because they’re stuck in a 90’s time warp?

Do they not know there is a faster better way?

My Gran doesn’t know there is a faster, better way, she still uses audio cassettes, calls taxis and watches movies on video.

In the same way, many SAP customers don’t know there is a faster better way available right now. However, some companies such as BP, Ralph Lauren, and the Interpublic Group do.

And they’re making sure that their competitive advantage is felt by using our toolset to ensure their vital processes run as fast as possible.

So enter the age of the customer and start to question why am I settling for slow performance?

If you want to learn more about how the Interpublic Group responded to customer needs by speeding up their report processes, check out this ebook…