NEW YORK, Jan. 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today introduced the SAP® BusinessObjects™ Sales Analysis for Retail analytic application powered by the SAP HANA™ platform. The application aims to offer prebuilt data models, key performance indicators (KPIs), role-specific dashboards and customized reports to provide retailers with a deeper understanding of all factors influencing the merchandising life cycle. The announcement was made at the NRF 101st Annual Convention & EXPO being held January 15-18 in New York City.

As the retail industry is inundated with large volumes of data, businesses need accurate insight into customer demand, along with a clear understanding of the impact of their promotions on stock levels and profits. SAP HANA provides retailers with real-time access to critical information and allows for nearly real-time interactive analysis not possible with traditional database technology. For retailers operating in separate sales, inventory and promotions systems, SAP BusinessObjects Sales Analysis for Retail aims to provide the integration needed for vastly improved scalability and performance.

Key features SAP BusinessObjects Sales Analysis for Retail aims to provide include:

Point-of-sale (POS) analysis to allow retailers to assess performance and generate quick responses through the use of prebuilt dashboards, interactive reports and more than 70 KPIs

Inventory management to provide retailers with the ability to identify critical stock and margin issues through close inventory alignment

Promotional analysis to enable retailers to understand the return on investment (ROI) and impact of promotions in real time, allowing users to set up thresholds, alerts and workflows for an early response system that drives performance

Store operations to help users understand which stores are performing best and why, allowing retailers to achieve visibility across different locations and manage by exception

"The ARTS board is very pleased that SAP has adopted the ARTS Data Warehouse 2 standard in a retail product offering," said Richard Mader, executive director, Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS). "It is interesting to see how SAP HANA can leverage the data model to provide deep retail content while providing sub-second response times even with multi-terabyte data sets. This is a great example of how our members can bring value to their customers and the entire industry via ARTS standards." SAP BusinessObjects Sales Analysis for Retail is planned for global availability to customers in the second quarter of 2012.