SAP for Wholesale trading

Question

Hi
what is the best solution for business, where Wholesale purchasing is done and Wholesale selling (keeping small margins)
if wholesale purchasing is done and both Whole sale selling is done and Retail selling is done - SAP IS Retail ?
what is the industry standard, and what SAPproducts or solutions are used in Wholesale Industry
thanks
rao

Answer 1

Dear Rao,
to decide if you are going to use ECC 6.0 with activated Retail Switch (SAP Retail ) or not, in my experience you have to take a close look at the processes that are supposed to be supported.
You mentioned Retail selling: are we talking about a Retail business where you connect POS systems to the ERP system and sell to consumers (more or less) always on the same price? This would be an indicator to use SAP Retail, as only this offers a POS Interface to download data (articles, prices, promotions..) to a POS system and also can process POS data (sales data, financial postings). But this just one out of several possible indicators.
A good way to start this process evaluation is actually to evaluate what kind of customers you have: known customer, for whom you need to calculate the sales prices within every sales transcation or consumers only. What processes concerning selling to customers need to be supported
You also might want to consider if you need one or more of the functionalities that only SAP Retail offers: e.g. Retail Promotion, Allocation table, the afore mentioned POS Interface, listing and assortment management. There also some limitations using  SAP Retail compared with ECC 6.0 w/o  Retail Switch which also need to taken into consideration. Please refer for more information to the Retail Wiki . In section "Special Topics" you find those two quite useful documents which will give you very detailled information:
SAP Retail Technology Facts and Retail Switch
Consequences of Activating the BF Set SAP Retail
Kind regards
Susanne