• Ambulatory care management
• Patient Management
• Patient Accounting and
• ISH-Clinical medical system

Tools like Operational Dashboards and Analytical Cockpits integrate transactional and analytical data across domains, departments and service lines of the hospital enterprise to provide enhanced operational control through easy-to-understand summary data, budget simulations for planning purposes, greater ability to meet compliance requirements and drive better operational excellence through information provided by cost and revenue analyses.

List of Organizational units: This list provides the list of basic organizational units maintained / organizational categories and the details of specific identifiers etc

Organizational Hierarchy: The program displays list of organizational units and their respective          hierarchy and the relationships among the higher level and lower level organizational units

Building units: This list provides the basic hospital building structure/ names of typical building units / room numbers and the relevant bed details of the specific rooms etc
Services list:  It provides the list of services the specific hospital can provide to the patients and the related service catalog information etc

2.Internal Organizational Reports: These reports facilitate the management to have a detailed understanding of the day to day operations of the key performing units.

Care unit workstation: The care unit work station provides an ergonomic interface for facilitating work on the care unit. It can provide the Occupancy/ Arrivals and Departure details of patient in a specific Organizational unit for a specific day/ for period of days
Occupancy statistics: This report provides the occupancy statistics (no of available/beds /occupied beds/ occupancy percentage) of the organizational units to a specific key date.

List of admissions (Inpatients/ Outpatients):  This report provides the details of patients who got admitted as inpatients/outpatients / admission date/ assigned room-bed details and relevant case details etc

List of discharges: This report provides the details of patients who got discharged as inpatients/outpatients / discharge date and relevant case details etc

List of Outpatients with physician details: This report provides the details of patients who got outpatients along with their attending physician details etc

Appointment details: this provides list of appointment maintained for that particular day, can be viewed by patient’s list/ by treating org unit and by attending physician

List of planning objects: Provides the details of objects like attending physician/ org unit/ building unit for which time slots can be maintained and appointment can be fixed for

3. Finance and Billing related Statistics:

Case list by Insurance provider: This list provides the details of Insurance service providers and the concerned patients with related insurance provider relations/ case list details etc

Service evaluation for patients :This list provides the details of specific services rendered to the patients / its start-end dates/ billable service details etc

Service and Billing statistics: This list provides the details of services available and their billable statuses versus actual status

Billing status of patients (Inpatients/Outpatients): This list provides the status of patients (Inpatients/Outpatients) / discharges details and their respective billing status (billed/ non billed)

 4.Government Mandated Statistics:
These reports provide the required information, which needs to be submitted to the government authorities for specific audits/ functions. These requirements differ from country to country

Patient census statistics of the hospitals:  this report provides the patient census statistics of the a particular hospital in the predefined format, with details like rate of use of planned beds / admission & discharge details / days covered by flat rate per cases etc.

Patient census statistics of the Departments: this report provides the patient census statistics of the a particular department/Org unit in the predefined format, with details like rate of use of planned beds / admission & discharge details / days covered by flat rate per cases etc.

Midnight census statistics: This report provides the details of patient census like external arrivals/ external departures etc  

KPIs (Key performance indicators):Key benefits delivered

• Improvement of regulatory compliance
• Improve capacity utilization
• Improves cost effective treatment
• Focus on accurate and traceable medical coding process
• Optimization of registration process enhances customer satisfaction
• Improved accounting process
• Real-time measurements and metrics are embedded throughout SAP ERP to support all business process in the enterprise
• Manage the entire life cycle of corporate performance management
• Can perform ad hoc queries and measure operational performance using real-time transactional data and metrics
• Organizations can analyze and optimize the workforce, implement and monitor corporate strategy, and continuously evaluate how various what-if scenarios affect business goals

Conclusion: In general SAP for Healthcare provides state of art software solutions tailored to meet specific standards, processes and the challenges of healthcare industry. Analytics, in particular help health organizations gain enterprise wide visibility for decision making in critical areas, helping organizations improve its operational efficiency,  mitigate risk and control costs, while enabling innovative business process and patient services. Typically IS-Healthcare provides Strategic management, financial, operational and workforce analytics, in collaborative environment-enabling organizations to share information and make accurate, rapid decisions and allowing hospital administrators to work cooperatively with payers, suppliers, other healthcare providers and statutory authorities. Healthcare specific analytics enhances operational control through easy-to-understand summary data, budget simulations for planning purposes, greater ability to meet compliance requirements and drive better operational excellence through information provided by cost and revenue analyses.

Ref: Sap for Healthcare www.sap.com/industries

In the milieu of steady state SAP ERP environment, with a set of existing processes running, when it comes to quantifying business value of an improvement it can be carried out in two dimensions. The first is the process effectiveness and second is the business continuity ensured.

Let us look at the first dimension. How well the process connects with the business goals and how far it aids in meeting those goals would determine how effective the process is. In case of ‘sales to customers’ process how well it generates revenue and how much revenue it generates would decide its effectiveness. A key to link a business process and the business goals is process metrics that help measure the process performance. These measures help in articulating how far the process is successful in generating value. In the example of ‘sales to customers’ process, some of the key process metrics are as follows.

• Hit Rate (Acquired Customers/ Prospective Customers)
• Book to Bill (Billed Value/ Booked Sales Order  Value )
• Cost of Sales ( Cost of Selling Effort / Revenue earned)
• Cost of Warranty and Returns (Cost of Warranty claims and Returns/Revenue  )
• Average cycle time (Order Entry to Billing Document released to Accounting)
• Customer acquisition cost
• Sales per Sales Employee
• Back Orders % of Sales Orders  Entered

Any improvement done in the ‘sales to customers’ process should be measured on these metrics with adequate data to determine the ‘pre’ and ‘post improvement’ levels. Therefore as a case of adding business value  if the step of sales order entry is automated, the quantification should include  the process cycle time reduction apart from user effort saving. Thus these measures help much beyond the effort and time saving in the quantification activity and in turn help in establishing a straight connect with the business goals.

The second dimension which must be considered for quantification is the business continuity ensured. In other words, avoiding interruptions in business processes. Every organization earns revenue from sales and incurs cost on various fronts like manufacturing and procurement. So if the business operations are stalled for 1 hour it can be looked as manufacturing effort lost for 1 hour and revenue delayed to the next financial year or even lost. Any proactive improvement that gets implemented to avoid such disruptive situation is as good as earning business continuity worth the business revenue apportioned to that 1 hour. With that if an enterprise has annual top line of $ 1 billion, taking 250 workdays in a year and 8 hours of productive work time per day, ensuring 1 hour of business continuity is worth $ 500,000. Let us correlate this point to a BVA case. A business had manual process to address the failed messages exchanged with SAP through IDocs. This used to result in delays in documents (like orders and invoices) creation and mutation. As an improvement option an automated clearing desk for interface messages was set up leading to reduction in time taken for corrections and posting the documents. On the business continuity dimension, an improvement of even 30 minutes in the documents posting can be quantified as business continuity worth $ 250,000 ensured.

Your views are welcome.

What I saw there was that business process automation in Manufacturing, Banking, Retail, Energy & Utilities industries are seeing rapid development. And with the impending entry into the EU, the demand for IT projects has considerably increased in the public sector to fulfill EU requirements. Moreover, the government is also contributing to the development of IT sphere here. Several dedicated institutes have been created, techno-parks are being constructed, special tax regime has been introduced, various promotional events are held – all of these are aimed at supporting the expanding IT industry. 

But major organizations in these regions are still not running on any major ERP system, and it is more of custom software being used to facilitate day-to-day business operations. Thus, these companies are now drawing long-term plan for SAP Implementation and SAP Projects are actually attracting special attention from government bodies in countries like Azerbaijan and Turkey. For example, many Banking Organizations here, plan to attain IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) compliance through SAP Implementation. Thus companies in this sector are now looking forward to SAP as means to their ends.

The second one is a fast growing global services company, headquartered in India. This company was using ABC till 6-7 years back. With the fast growth of the organization and frequent organizational restructure (every 3-5 years), this company found that ABC is too complex and inflexible to carry on. And it dumped its ABC system for simplicity and flexibility. There are many companies like the second one, which either implemented ABC or tried to implement or at least evaluated ABC, but dumped it on their way. This is not because they didn’t see value out of ABC but primarily because of complexity, inflexibility and cost.

In the part 1 of this blog, we agreed that IT has a definite role to play in adaption of ABC. It promises to make ABC simpler, flexible and cost-effective. One of the critical success factors in successful implementation of ABC is the selection of the right software. As there is no single tool that fits all, the evaluation has to be carried out on a case to case basis. The major evaluation criteria are: 

1. Transactional or Analytical ABC system: An ABC system can be part of transactional system (Eg.- ERP). This is best suited for management reporting, operational decision making, budgetary control, compliance like inventory valuation, COGS valuation etc. Another option is Analytical ABC system. This can fetch data from heterogeneous sources. These are more suited for tactical & strategic decision making and what-if simulations. Analytic systems also provide more modeling flexibility than transactional systems.
2. Business Requirement Fitment: Organizations have different purposes and requirements for their ABC system. The software must be evaluated against those requirements.
3. Integration with other IT systems: The software should easily integrate with the overall IT landscape
4. Scalability, Flexibility and Performance
5. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): The TCO (license cost, implementation cost, training cost and maintenance cost over a period of time) should be lower. There may be tools which has higher upfront cost and still offer lower TCO because of intuitive user experience and business self support.

Let’s stop at the evaluation criteria for now. The subsequent blogs will focus on the tools available for analytical ABC system, implementation methodologies, analyst view and standing of SAP’s product in this area. Till then please send across your comments and feedback. 

Security of Data, Validation and Compliance adherence is what Pharma companies will like to achieve from their Offshoring venture. Not all IT Service provider may have knowledge in these aspects. Also, the operational processes and tools may differ from one Pharma companies to another. Thus, to be successful the Pharma IT companies should first build a Offshoring model with robust process framework which has a same Validation and Compliance level as if work is being executed from Pharma Companies own offices. For this, in arrangement with IT service provider, trained and certified Pharma Quality Managers should be put in place for each of the IT Projects and Support engagement. Implement the Security and Authorization policies with relevant access. A better arrangement is to have the dedicated floor space with monitored and restricted entry/exit access to project personnel only. Such an arrangement mimics as if work is being done from an onsite location and has the same quality and process adherence. Each work package executed from offshore should be checked and audited by the Pharma Quality Managers in place for these tasks. This would also further raise the confidence level that Offshore work meets the required adherence. Perform quarterly audits over the process compliance from Offshore and plug the gaps. The Offshore Pharma Quality Managers should form the extended team of the central Validation and Compliance department of the Pharma company. Monitor the Non-conformance and process violations from Offshore and include these in the Offshoring KPIs. Once this is sustained for six months to a year than in subsequent phases IT Offshoring volume can be increased to realize the full potential.

Presently, the Pharma companies doing IT offshoring successfully are the ones which have entered into long term relationship with the IT Service providers as both the parties have to incur the intial investment to build and operate the sustainable model. There are successful examples of Offshoring of critical enterprise applications e.g. SAP support and maintenance engagements and SAP Implementation and Upgrade projects to name a few.

Erik Rasmussen, Founder of the Copenhagen Climate Council, explains: "Reducing the emissions that until now have been so linked to our economic growth and betterment will be an enormous, unprecedented global challenge but will also provide significant opportunities for sustainable growth, green jobs, development and innovation."

Since the last two decades there has been an increased focus by the global councils towards the required efforts for the global temperature control and you might have already come across similar statements during the last few months. Speeches like these from the global leaders and the environment specialists seek agreement on effective measurement, reporting and verification of emissions by businesses, and the requirement to gauge the correctness of incentives like carbon credits rewarded for scientific & technological advancements in operations for reduced emission targets. Though I am a supporter to this need of the hour, but here the reason to highlight these excerpts is not to debate on these, but to present an idea about how an SAP offering can help businesses worldwide take advantage of this climate issue to boost their growth.

Now with the initial draft in place, I wish to shift your attention towards one of these lucrative incentives impacting business finances, Carbon Market and Emission trading, the foundations for which were laid in early 1970’s. In short this administrative approach rewards the organizations for reduced emissions while others pay charges for polluting by buying these credits. So, finally what we converge to is a topic to interest our P&L statements.

With these articles and increasing global focus on emissions, a question which preoccupied my mind was “We all know and probably our business work with carbon credits. Do we have technology to calculate the actual profit and help businesses increase profitability through their Carbon Management?”

The answer is “Yes”. SAP has comprehensive offerings for Sustainability Performance Management, but I would restrict this discussion to SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management (SAP PCM). SAP PCM is designed to calculate and evaluate the costs associated with individual business drivers and assign these costs at the primary activity/ operational level. This helps businesses gain deeper insights for informed arbitrations for the activities and their impacts through multiple costing & management models like Activity Based Costing. The Activity based costing model helps business assign direct & indirect costs to each business process & activity, for precise strategic business decisions.

With this idea, I wish to say thanks & “adieu”, and also promise to get back soon with details on how SAP BO PCM can help businesses wealthier with Carbon management.

Addressing the missing link through SAP ERP can lead to effective utilization of the investment already made in SAP application and can even obviate the need of another IT application, in turn can add value through a simplified process. The activities where a business process or its stage is still carried out off-SAP and can be brought into SAP as a new functionality can create remarkable value for the business. This can not only replace another inefficient application but also bring in a manual task into an organized IT application.  At several enterprises it is observed that all the modules of SAP ERP do not receive the due attention for implementation. Some of the SAP ERP modules may get a back seat in implementation project scope and instead a new interface gets developed with the legacy tools for similar functionality that must be in use for many years. A leading business literature publication, CIO, has mentioned interesting findings on usage of SAP based on a study conducted by IT Consultancy West Trax. The findings stated “in those business areas where some SAP standard transactions had been used by companies, a very high proportion of the available functionality was still going unused”. The take away is that a reality check on the effective utilization of the running SAP application is a good idea for adding value to the business.

Making the SAP ERP more User-friendly is another potential area for creating value. Reducing the system user’s effort to carry out transactions can add value by allowing the user to spend more time on the Business side of his work. It can be a tiny change technically, but as long as the business process realizes a benefit it should qualify as value add. For example, in the ‘Help’ menu available on each SAP ERP screen adding a business specific help option (and creating relevant content at the backend) gives easy and quick access to the business specific way of running the transaction which is typically stored in a Business Process Procedure (BPP) in the document repository of the company. In the absence of such quick help on screen, the user has to all the way reach to that right and updated document in the document repository, read, understand and come back to the SAP screen to execute the transaction. Needless to mention, in this longer route, there are challenges of time and ease of finding the right document which cause loss of productive business effort.

The next promising area for helping the business with the SAP ERP is the Master Data Process Standardization. Having a single version of clearly defined master data creation and editing processes and ensuring user community as well as support staff is updated on it can result in considerable value with the goodness of the data that acts as backbone of business processes. Many a times poorly maintained master data halts business transactions and in turn affects agility of the business.  At a client it was seen that SAP Purchasing master data was maintained by particular users with their own specialized ways (read custom programs) for different countries with practically no useful documentation. There were offline files like MS Access used just to identify the next available number while creating a material master record, since the number was to be used in other ERP instances as well and for retaining the identity of the product in multiple instances the same code was seen as a way out.  One of the main reasons for such arrangement was multiple SAP and non SAP instances and isolated business and support staff hierarchies. The issues with this arrangement were many like not so good quality of master data, inflated lead times for creation and editing master data records, low productivity of the combined SAP support team, high dependencies on the few support staff, custom programs with limitation of modifications etc. The single answer to all such issues is to have single process for master data maintenance across sites, instances, languages and training entire support team on this common process increasing the data quality and availability.

In the next blog in this series I will focus on ways of articulating business value added from the SAP ERP. Please share your views and any more such avenues of BVA with SAP ERP.

Growth drivers of the Hospital Industry

Even in this technology driven 21st century, health remains a basic need of mankind and ‘healthcare-events’ dominate or at least influence life of most of the people. Here are some of the ‘growth drivers’ of the hospital industry:

• Medical Tourism
• Medical informatics & Telemedicine
• Outsourcing
    1. Healthcare services outsourcing
    2. Diagnostic services
    3. Healthcare business management services
• Increased awareness
• Medical Insurance
• Aging Population
• Growing urbanization
• Low cost treatment

Healthcare Industry - Key Challenges

Key challenges in general:

• Managing  complex business structures
• Working with multiple legacy systems
• Rising healthcare costs and low reimbursement rates
• Rapid technology advances in treatment process
• Qualified workforce shortages
• Increasing competition (such as Physician run outpatient surgery centres, specialty hospitals and diagnostic centres)
• Ever stringent government regulations

IT challenges:

• Dependency on multiple small packages and SMEs for day to day operations
• Integration and formal communication among the existing systems are low
• Overall service levels and patient satisfaction levels are low
• Too much dependency on manual processes, paper work resulting in  regular and unusual delays in operations
• High cost dependency on independent product vendors adding into increase in maintenance costs
• Too much workload on employees often resulting in non productive work

The future of healthcare lies in critical convergence of the diverse aspects of this industry towards patient-centric care. This trend obviously results in focusing on:

• Personalized ‘patient based’ medicine
• Consumer directed health plans
• The global, patient owned, electronic health records( EHR )
• Disease and preventive management
• Individual pharmaceutical risk and safety management
• Patient empowerment driven relationships
• Web based, online service delivery

Learn how Infosys partnered with a healthcare major for their SAP Upgrade. Click here to register for the webinar.

The business value has two facets  - tangible and intangible. The financial performance parameters like Revenue, Profit, Cost, and Market Capitalization are some of the key tangible parameters that constitute business value. The equally important intangible part includes areas like brand equity, competitive positioning, utility of the products or services to the consumers, social standing of the enterprise. All such elements put together lead to the business performance as well as potential of the enterprise. Any activity or arrangement that helps to boost such tangible or intangible elements should qualify as business value add.

In case of SAP ERP instances in steady state, the support activity is subject to operational efficiency like the consumption of Electricity. The basic expectations from the support team become ensuring continuous availability of the application and carry out minor changes to align with the business alterations. When it comes to major enhancement like more than one person-month of effort, it usually qualifies for a ‘project’ funded by the respective business unit. As a measure of business value the ROI and Cost-Benefit analysis are included in the ‘business case’ for any such new project proposed.

Being in the operational efficiency paradigm, the common arrangement of having SLAs for each task and aligning the support team with it helps just to administrate support environment. Beyond the operational efficiency there remains a considerable scope and it leading to innate expectation of business value add from the SAP support team as business enabler.

Let us now look at what it really takes to do business value add and articulate it. The biggest source of ideas on business value as well as a radical prerequisite is the knowledge of the business.  The more the support team knows business processes, the higher are chances of promising improvement idea coming from the support team. I came across a requirement from the business to develop a report that was touching all modules involved in customer demand fulfillment. In Make-to-Order scenario the user wanted a report to know itemwise details in the following sequence – when the sales order was created and transferred for manufacturing, when was the production order created, if it is WIP how far the production order is complete when the report is drawn, if the raw materials required are available in adequate quantity , if the production order  is complete when was the FG confirmed, when was the QM inspection lot created and if it is cleared by QM, if any delivery is created against the sales order, if the shipping activities have started ,and lastly if  it is ready for goods issue or has any hurdle at any point in this whole chain of activities. Needless to mention this was a complex requirement for custom development. Now let us look at it from the Business perspective. The sales representative wanted to update the customer frequently on the progress of the high value orders placed and also wanted to know if there is any hurdle at any stage to follow up with concerned responsible person. Delivering on or before committed time was in tern linked to the KPAs of the sales representative. Hence the requirement was well called for.

In the sequel of this blog I will describe some of the key avenues of adding value to the business and articulating it. Please share your views.

To make the Complaint Mangement solution robust and agile, let us examine the overall process which consists of following steps:
a) Complaint Registration
b) Complaint Assignment and Processing
c) Root Cause Analysis including Corrective Action and Preventive Action (CAPA)
d) Reporting ,Alerts,Trending and Communication
e) Complaint Closure
f) Proactive Monitoring

The weakness in the above process management can be many. The underlying technical systems are low in technical and business value and require multiple manual interventions in the complaint life cycle. The systems are managed on regional basis and thus lack to give a global view of complaints on a given product. The integration between the systems catering to different parts of complaint stages may be missing totally or partially and thus inducing the delay in tracking and monitoring of complaints. The analysis of adverse drug events will involve multiple departments e.g. Quality,Research & Development,Product Life Cycle management teams and the complaint system should facilitate collaboration amongst various teams involved. Because of mergers and acquisitions it is quite likely that complaint handling process is not consistent across the organization.

It is critical for Pharma companies to have a standardized process for Complaint Management which is supported by solution advanced in both technology and functionality to meet the above challenges. The salient features of an effective solution are listed as follows:
• Web based application catering to all stages of Complaint life cycle
• Capability for Workflow, Alerts and Notifications
• Auto routing of Complaints
• Ability to manage documentation and attachments throughout Complaint life cycle
• Internal and Customer view of Complaints
• Tracking & Monitoring of Complaints
• Complaint Escalations
• Single database for all Complaints
• Multiple language capability
• Electronic Signatures and Audit Trail
• Integration with Enterprise Applications (ERP) , Quality Management, Product Life Cycle Management applications
• Integration with Adverse Event handling process
• Collaborative framework to manage complaint process across cross-functional departments
• Regulatory and Internal Reporting,Trend Analysis
• Minimum manual intervention
• Scalable Technical Architecture
• High Performance and Response times
• Security & Authorization for relevant access control

Apart from increased customer awareness and because of ever rising regulatory and market pressures on Pharma industry, there is renewed focus on Complaints Management.Pharma and Healthcare companies should review their Complaint Management processes and systems to incorporate the required capabilities that arenecessary to meet current market challenges.

A robust and effective solution will not only help in reduction of cost of compliance but will also result in increased customer loyalty through improved response times and better customer experience.

When it comes to IT, the first decision is usually between buy versus build. The ABC allocation model is more or less standard; the Off-the-shelf (OTS) ABC software have matured during the last decade; and building an advanced ABC model is too cumbersome - are the strong arguments in favor of buy option. The build option should be considered only when there is a very strong reason for this. Like - the ABC model is too simple or highly customized or is required to be monolithically integrated with other in-house systems etc.

Talking about the OTS option, the choice can be between specialized ABC software and ABC module of ERP packages. ABC module of ERP package is ideal where ABC is required for operational decision making and most of the data is available within ERP itself.  

However, specialized ABC software should be considered in the following cases:
1) ABC is required for tactical or strategic decision making.
2) Multi-dimensional analysis of overheads are required
3) Underlying data is stored in heterogeneous systems
4) ABC model is required to be flexible as frequent changes are expected.

SAP suite of products has both the offerings - SAP ERP has a sub-module for ABC in SAP Controlling (SAP CO-ABC). SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management (SAP PCM) is specialized software for ABC from SAP suite of products.

Right tool selection plays a very important role in the success of ABC. In the subsequent blogs let’s look at some of the important evaluation criteria for ABC software selection, implementation methodology and other related topics. In the mean time, please leave your comments and suggestions .

In the previous blog I have highlighted the reasons why the spending in digital marketing is accelerating and the areas in which an extensive use of digital marketing channels could mainly impact the organization.

Now let’s look deeper at the impacts of digital marketing on the company information systems.

 CRM systems are requiring new functionalities for managing the campaign across multiple channels, capacity to gather from multiple sources new types and higher volumes of information regarding the consumer or the customer, tools and repositories to enable an effective digital asset management.

 Web: the trend is to define and implement new platforms that facilitate the development and hosting of the web initiatives,  increase the capacity to deliver personalized multimedia content, promote the reuse of existing assets for the initiative creation
 
 Reporting and analytics: here the  key element is to develop and elaborate new indicator and scorecards to track the effectiveness of the web initiative, monitor consumer/customer behavior in the web and integrate these measures with the traditional marketing indicators.

How SAP is currently supporting these areas?

We need to look into mySAP CRM.
With the CRM suite SAP addresses multichannel campaign management and allows the interaction with the client via web making available some of the functionalities through the internet channel (e.g quotations and order management, actions) 
But overall at the moment I think it does not provide very specialized E-marketing functionalities.

Campaign management
 Marketing activities can be executed through different interaction channels: direct mail, e-mail, phone, web, fax, and SMS.
 Online marketing channels to plan, develop, and execute e-mail marketing campaigns.

Web Channel management
 Support campaign execution on the web. E.g. the system uses campaign IDs and coupon codes to determine products flagged for campaigns in SAP CRM and to determine campaign pricing in the Web shop. Also create private campaigns for specific target groups or public campaigns for all Web shop visitors. 
 Manage customer loyalty processes via Internet

Web channel analytics
 Perform analysis on the use of web functionalities in order to track the behavior, target the customers and drive future marketing activities.

Digital Asset Management
 Within the marketing resource management a central repository for the digital assets (photos, videos, or text documents) can be maintained. To each object properties and authorization concepts can be assigned to each object in order to manage it efficiently and secure direct web access. Besides the systems tracks the download information and provides specific reporting for each asset.

What is your point of view on this topic? Your thoughts would be highly appreciated and more than welcome.
Is SAP developing any innovative solution with the social CRM?
I will discuss on it in my next blog.