Northern European retailer Salling Group has modernised its ERP environment with SAP S/4HANA Cloud as it prepares to expand its use of Artificial Intelligence across customer experience, employee productivity and supply chain operations.
Salling Group is building the foundations for a wider Artificial Intelligence transformation after moving its ERP environment to SAP S/4HANA Cloud through RISE with SAP.
The retailer, which operates more than 2,100 stores across Denmark, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, serves around 15 million customers each week and generates annual revenue of approximately €12 billion.
SAP technology has supported Salling Group’s operations for more than 20 years, with the latest cloud modernisation intended to provide a foundation for greater use of AI across the business.
Alan Jensen, CIO and Executive Vice President at Salling Group, said: “We want to make everyday life better for our customers by always having the right product at the right price when they need it. We also want to make everyday life better for our employees, so the tools and systems they work with are intuitive and easy to use.”
The company has identified three main objectives for its AI strategy: improving customer experience, making employees’ jobs easier and increasing operational efficiency.
Logistics is expected to be one of the areas where the technology could have the greatest impact.
Salling Group currently uses SAP Extended Warehouse Management across 29 distribution centres to manage large volumes of goods and digitalise warehouse processes.
The infrastructure supports deliveries to the group’s stores and is intended to create a more efficient and resilient supply chain.
With its cloud ERP foundation now in place, Salling Group is exploring how AI and greater automation can be applied to these operations and other areas of the business.
Jensen said the retailer will also examine the potential of SAP’s Autonomous Enterprise approach as its AI strategy develops.
“Autonomous Enterprise looks very exciting,” he said. “There is clearly great potential in terms of improving the way we run our business every single day. Therefore, we need to be curious and explore how we can apply it.”
According to SAP, the longer-term strategy is focused on using AI and cloud technology to generate measurable improvements across customer experience, employee productivity and supply chain efficiency.
