SAP CAR a Step Towards Integration

The new landscape of retail has provided customers with 24/7 access. Retailers are sitting on a goldmine of data but without any way to analyze and glean this information. This was the core idea behind CAR or Customer Activity Repository and forms the backbone of the retail industry. 

The initial stages of CAR were limited to sales audit, but with developing technologies we can now avail the benefits of features such as Omni channel inventory, retail planning, assortment management, governance, store inventory monitoring and maintenance, and much more. To support omnichannel sales, SAP CAR is the basis that currently unifies transactional sales data, which is frequently dispersed across numerous applications and formats. 

Retailers today can execute orders knowing exactly how much and where inventory is available by using CAR for real-time inventory queries from different omnichannel platforms, which will keep satisfied customers coming back. CAR supports Available to Promise (ATP) capabilities so order orchestration improves and also helps keep the overall SAP environment streamlined while lowering operational costs with fewer systems to support. 

CAR’s predecessor, the former POS DM lacked the ability to support omnichannel sales and had no support for planning and execution. These restrictions are overcome by SAP CAR, which offers immediate analysis and reporting at the most granular level and individual sales transactions from other channels, as well as near-real-time access to transaction-level omnichannel sales data. 

How Does CAR work? 

Both applications depend on POS Inbound Processing Engine to collect customer data from stores. However, CAR offers significant advantages over its predecessors, such as UDF or Unified Demand Forecast and Demand Data Foundation. 

Unified Demand Forecast 

The SAP Customer Activity Repository's Unified Demand Forecast (UDF) module offers demand modeling and forecasting services based on factors such as sales history, configuration, master data, planning data, and model parameters. 

Demand Data Foundation 

DDF provides planning, analysis, and forecasting capabilities to the consuming applications that are deployed on top of the SAP Customer Activity Repository. A proprietary data model, data import infrastructure, reuse frameworks (such exception handling and process controller), and reuse tools are all included in the reusable data layer known as DDF (such as data maintenance and scheduling interfaces). 

By extending the initial sales audit base with Omni-channel Inventory Visibility and Unified Demand Forecasting, SAP CAR can be used by all retail planning systems, resulting in better inventory management and lower inventory expenses.