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How SAP HANA is a Game Changer in the Retail Space

Today’s dynamic retail space requires that the modern retailer make critical decisions on selling and purchasing on–the –go. Converting the massive amounts of retail data generated through purchase records, social media etc. into immediately actionable information using real-time analytics is significantly limited by the capabilities of traditional database applications. SAP HANA’s extreme speed and efficiency greatly advances real-time analyzing abilities. This aids instant decision-making and predictive analysis, making it a dramatic improvement over previous platforms. The following use cases help us explore how SAP HANA is changing the rules of the retail game by lending itself to a plethora of innovative retail solutions in inventory management, localized mobile advertising and in-store customer engagement.

Use Cases

1. SAP HANA helps Phildar in the timely control of its inventory

When leading women’s fashion retailer Phildar wanted to expand its Ready-to–Wear (RTW) line by centralizing inventory control of 1000 items across its 660 stores, it found its existing systems were taking too long to aggregate, process and display individual store sales and inventory data. This hampered its instantaneous decision-making ability.

To counter its problems, Phildar implemented a SAP HANA application that helped it:

  • Reduce database integration time to 3 hours
  • Provide instant analytics processing capabilities which reduced decision making time and hesitation among personnel to ask for requests

Phildar’s RTW segment reported a double-digit growth because of better order processing and price management.


2. Retailigence creates context-specific mobile ad engine using SAP HANA

Today’s mobile advertising is not nearly as personalized as the medium of its broadcast. Therefore, it is ineffective in stimulating audience purchase behaviour, as it does not account for contextual information such as individual shopper profiles, shopper proximity, weather, local retail inventory etc. There is a pressing need for ad content, which is highly relevant for different shoppers and effects higher audience conversions.


Retailigence used SAP HANA to create adPOP – an ad engine that displays relevant ads to consumers with customized messages that dynamically accounts for demographic profile and changes in local inventory:

  • Helps stimulate consumer interest as ads shown are not irrelevant
  • Increases audience conversions as it directs users to shops that display  zip codes of the shops that have the product advertised

3. Retailers increase in-store customer engagement using HANA                                                        

Multi–franchise retailers face the challenges of matching the level of personalized shopping experience and one–to-one customer engagement provided by mom-and-pop stores. These challenges affect their ability to retain customer loyalty and influence in-store consumer purchase decisions. However, the use of smartphones by shoppers during the shopping process provides larger franchise stores with the means to a possible solution.

SAP Precision Retailing powered by SAP HANA helps multi-franchise retailers increase customer engagement by:

  • Sending dynamically created personalized offers and suggestions straight to consumers on their smart phones during the shopping process, based on their in-store location, purchase history, inventory etc.
  • Providing in–store location maps, which allow stores to view customer behavior in real-time which helps them analyze store promotions, signage, and product demand in order to make instant decisions

The ability to make sense of large volumes of data in an instant is a highly desirable element in any business scenario, not least of all in retail. SAP HANA’s massive speed and radical efficiency has enabled it to carry this out at a never-before-experienced level. The use cases mentioned above are a testament to SAP HANA’s ability to transform various activities in the retail value chain for the better. In the cutthroat world of retail, making this transformation could be the difference between success and failure.


  1. Link: Read how Phildar centralized control of inventory
  2. adPOP:


    3.  SAP Precision Retailing Link:


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