OREANDA-NEWS. SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) announced that Lidl, a leading retailer in Europe with nearly 10,000 stores and 130 distribution centers across 26 countries, is now using the SAP ERP powered by SAP HANA, SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA and SAP Customer Activity Repository applications to help simplify and centralize its IT infrastructure.

After the successful implementation of the new ERP system at Lidl Austria, further subsidiaries will follow.

For over 40 years, the successful grocery chain headquartered in Neckarsulm, Germany, has been continuously expanding its business globally and providing value to its customers by selling top-quality products at low prices. To keep up with this growth while remaining cost-effective, Lidl needed a new centralized IT system to help harmonize its legacy IT architecture and lay a flexible foundation for creating new business models in the future.

Now, SAP HANA provides Lidl with a single platform to run essential applications that optimize and automate Lidl’s core merchandising, logistics and in-store processes. The in-memory technology behind SAP HANA can process large amounts of data in real time. This is a business-critical aspect of the retail industry where innovation cycles are becoming increasingly shorter and customer demand is changing rapidly. Targeting the right markets and servicing customers with relevant assortments in all channels require retailers to systematically analyze data to better understand and react to customer behavior.

Lidl also uses SAP Customer Activity Repository to gain a real-time view into the current performance of store operations. With SAP Customer Activity Repository, Lidl is able to provide its business departments information on all customer interactions and current stock levels. “Reporting and acting on a store’s daily key operating figures usually took 24 hours,” said Alexander Sonnenmoser, divisional board member for Business Technology at Lidl. “Thanks to SAP Customer Activity Repository, we are now able to analyze point-of-sale data in real time several times a day.”

SAP helps customers like Lidl realize faster time to value coupled with a lower total cost of ownership. From design and software implementation through going live and hypercare operations, end-to-end SAP MaxAttention services helped keep the project on the right track.

In an effort to expand its industry leadership, Lidl has announced plans to enter the U.S. market, and the SAP HANA platform will be a cornerstone of the IT strategy.