With the rise of e-commerce, manufacturers are feeling the hot breath of customers in their neck who expect them to deliver highly customized products very quickly. This not only applies to the B2C segment, but also to B2B suppliers. Most Sales & Marketing departments are big fans of this individualized service approach, but for Supply Chain it can sometimes feel like a nightmare. However, expanding the product portfolio with customer-unique products – so-called ‘lot size one’ products – doesn’t have to radically change the supply chain operation. In order to demonstrate that, I want to invalidate some misconceptions which are currently labeled as truth by a large part of the market.

Privacy remains a hot topic. Are there any boundaries to our privacy in an era where social media rules? How should we handle the personal data provided by employees, customers or suppliers? Can we freely ask our customers to provide their data for marketing purposes? Are your employees entitled to request your HR department for a deletion of some personal data?

The new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) answers all of these questions.

In today’s digital era, mobile and web apps took the business center stage. Through a variety of apps, business users have relevant information literally at their fingertips, any time, any place, anywhere. More recently, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have also presented themselves as alternative ways of accessing information easily – but will these technologies become as mainstream as apps are today? I believe they will. Although they currently mainly evoke images of youngsters chasing Pokémon or women gaining inspiration in virtual fitting rooms, both technologies hold great promise in a B2B context as well.

During my internship at delaware, my main project was to investigate the integration of beacon technology with SAP Hybris Marketing. Since the 1702 update of SAP Hybris Marketing, it had become possible to import beacon data in SAP Hybris Marketing. But how does it do that and where is the added value?