Innovative Technology Solution
to Illustrate
Omnichannel Pricing

Ernsting's family, a family-owned German textile retail company, specializes in women's and children's fashion and operates approximately 1,925 stores in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands.

The fashion company has long pursued an omnichannel strategy and was looking for ways to replace single-channel pricing, in which each sales channel maintains its own promotional management and pricing engine.

When launching the new e-commerce platform for its online store, the mobile customer app, and the "endless shelf"—which allows customers to access an expanded product assortment in retail stores—each of which would have required a new promotion management system and pricing engine, Ernsting's family turned to the SAP and retail experts at CAS AG to work with the IT consulting firm on finding more efficient approaches to the fundamental issue of pricing while simultaneously leveraging synergies.

The technical challenge was to establish a shared understanding across all levels and channels within the company. To this end, many different stakeholders from the operational and strategic divisions, as well as from senior management, were involved, which meant that a wide range of needs had to be addressed simultaneously—including those of the sales channels.

The first step in the solution was to form two interdisciplinary teams, one of which handledoperational matters such as campaign management logic, while the other was responsible for strategic issues such as pricing hierarchy levels. This approach also fostered even broader acceptance within the Münsterland-based company, as employees were given the opportunity to voice their needs during the process.

The challenge with the internal IT structure lay in the closed point-of-sale system, which had been used for years in the Ernsting's family stores without any third-party software or cloud capabilities. In this context, it was necessary to consider and make fundamental decisions that would affect the entire company, including its branches. It was necessary to discuss system security issues that were not allowed to affect the responsiveness of the services.

To ensure that all technical requirements for pricing were taken into account, the IT specialists at CAS AG, together with the IT contacts at Ernsting's family, to conduct a preliminary study.

As part of this process, these requirements were first compared with the SAP standard to identify where the standardized solution needed to be intelligently enhanced. In a co-innovation initiative, the SAP partner company CAS AG worked with SAP OPPS Product Management to integrate new functionalities into the SAP standard to ensure that customer-specific requirements could be met—such as, for example, that every 100th Shopping with the loyalty card wins the prize. This enables a consistent shopping experience at every touchpoint, as SAP Omnichannel Promotion Pricing provides the foundation for offering customers the same shopping experience at every touchpoint.

A "cloud-first" architecture was selected and implemented for the customer project at Ernsting's family. Promotions for all online and offline touchpoints are now managed on the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) using Omnichannel Promotion Pricing (OPPS). SAP Omnichannel Promotion Pricing (OPPS) is an innovative B2B IT solution for the unified management of pricing and promotional strategies across various sales channels. As a central price and promotion repository, it consolidates all relevant data for price calculation, enabling promotional campaigns to be efficiently calculated and optimally distributed.

In addition, the company relies on a backup plan for offline scenarios to ensure that stores are ready to sell at all times. To guarantee this, our IT experts have implemented SAP's local PPS Pox in conjunction with our CAS Store Integration Bus . This enables reliable, efficient data delivery and ensures that, even in offline scenarios, stores can still operate independently and without data loss continueoperatecan continue.