Bilot’s Customer Engagement consultants joined in a hackathon spirit to find out what SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer 1605 release had hidden under its hood. If you are not familiar with the product, Hybris Cloud for Customer (a.k.a C4C) is SAP’s cloud-based CRM system. The software supports sales, customer service, field service as well marketing processes. The nicest features include a modern user interface that scales out-of-the-box to practically any device. Now you might ask yourself, why we must have a hackathon for this? Well, we must not have it, but let me explain why we wanted to have it.
First of all, as it is a cloud software, there are regular updates every quarter that are automatically upgraded to every tenant, and there are usually a lot of new features released. For us working intensively with the solution the releases are significant milestones. The release notes are in general around 200 slides long. In practice, you need to update your knowledge regarding the solution quarterly, to be able to give recommendations, not even speaking of implementing them. It is also as important to know how the new features might affect the existing solutions. Our customers expect us to be on top of these things and provide them with up-to-date recommendations. They, of course, love when we are quickly able to solve issues that might occur after an update, or even be proactive and point out potential failures in advance.
Secondly, this is a way more fun way to do it – a way that breaks the pattern of the day to day habits. The concept is generically called gamification, which has proven to be an excellent method for boosting workplace productivity and a great source of creativity. By collectively joining forces in a hackathon-like setting, we can cover more ground much faster. At the same time, there is a lot more knowledge sharing happening. A phenomenon that needs to be fostered in a world of digital knowledge work. Gatherings like these are the source of innovations where people are exchanging ideas without a formal structure. Innovation, however, is a topic that I need to come back to in another blog post.
So the features for this release? First of all, the most noticeable change was that the product has now officially been re-branded to SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer, from previously just being SAP Cloud for Customer. This was an expected move by SAP to now be able to offer all of their products in the Commerce and Customer Engagement suite under the Hybris brand.
Secondly, another aspect that cannot go unnoticed is that SAP is investing in bringing new features that will support customers using the field service functionalities. The system now supports the “van stock”, which can be utilized to show the technicians on the field an up to date stock list. There are some new features for maintenance plans. You will now have even more options for the maintenance intervals, which are used to trigger service tickets. Time recording can now be done on an item level, and there are also rounding rules available. The resource scheduler has been improved to take service technicians’ availability time, and there is also a color coding available for different assignments, for easier work distribution.
The other areas did no remain untouched, despite the investments in the fields service. The sales area saw some improved features for merging accounts and contacts. Now you can merge accounts that belong to an account hierarchy, and as a added feature you can also merge accounts and contacts with leads and opportunities. The marketing side got a long waiting feature finally launched – dynamic target groups. This now allows users to create target groups that are automatically updated based on certain key figures.
Then there were a ton of user interface improvements. The ability to expand and restrict list lengths will for sure be a feature that will be implemented here and there. The mobile applications also got updated of course. Some new offline features were launched, the product list being one of them. Possibility to download to excel on mobile devices and also a business card scanner were released. I could go on, but these were just some examples of the new features added in the May 2016 release.
If you have questions regarding the new release or think that we could be in assistance with the new features, please feel free to contact us. See you at the next hackathon!
