BERLIN: SAP SE today announced that its customers are simplifying their operations with industry cloud solutions at a rapid pace. The Industry Cloud organization at SAP, led by Simon Paris, is co-innovating with customers and partners to deliver solutions that are quickly spreading across all industries.

In the second half of 2014, SAP has won many news customers for line-of-business (LOB)-focused cloud applications. The announcement was made at SAP TechEd® && d-code®, being held November 11–13 in Berlin.

“Customers and partners are clearly eager to shape the future of industry-specific solutions in the cloud, benefiting from the speed of innovation and continuity without disruption,” said Paris, president, Industry Cloud, SAP SE. “By combining their firsthand knowledge and experience with our industry-specific capabilities, customers get a smooth and rapid migration into the cloud, protecting past investments while creating an open platform to add new features today’s users expect.”

Rapid, Widespread Industry Cloud Adoption

SAP customers are setting the pace for deploying and using industry-specific cloud solutions because of the compelling combination of value for each LOB along end-to-end industry processes, consumer-grade end-user experience and ease of deployment and integration. Customer examples include:

Energy & Natural Resources

AkzoNobel is a leading global paints and Coatings Company and a major producer of specialty chemicals. It recently deployed the SAP® Cloud for Sales solution as a hybrid model integrated with the existing SAP® Customer Relationship Management application to offer its sales people a single source of truth regarding customer sales and logistics on mobile devices.

Almost immediately the solution had an 83 percent adoption rate of 500 users, and the company now has more transparency to see where and why it wins. By combining sales automation, enterprise resource planning (ERP) integration, analytics, mobility and the latest advancements in user interface technology from SAP, SAP Cloud for Sales helps AkzoNobel be more responsive to its customers’ needs.

Americas Styrenics (“AmSty”) is a leading producer of polystyrene and styrene in the Americas. Within 12 months, it deployed SAP ERP powered by SAP HANA using the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service in four countries and seven manufacturing plants.

Benefits so far include a 50 percent reduction in the time required for the financial close, a faster financial consolidation process, greater data transparency for real-time reporting and faster response times to addressing business challenges.

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