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Successful Saas Implementation

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Chapter 4, Real World Activity #1: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
Prior to the implementation of a successful Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, General Electric’s Global Procurement Group had the immense challenge of coordinating the multinational company’s massive supply chain. GE settled upon Aravo, a technology platform that, although relatively small and little-known, provided the functionality and cost savings that GE needed. This eventually became the largest SaaS implementation of all time, with over 100,000 GE procurement users able to access the same information on over 500,000 global suppliers at anytime, anywhere in the world. The following discussion will focus on other examples of successful SaaS implementations similar to the case of GE.
SuccessFactors and Nissan
SaaS applications are not only limited to supply chain functions. SaaS can be used to support a wide variety of key business functions and strategies. SuccessFactors, a company that was acquired in 2012 by SAP AG, is focused on providing cloud-based human capital management (HCM) software. SuccessFactors allows a company to better utilize its workforce’s full potential: corporate key objectives are cascaded down to individuals across all levels of the organization, ensuring that individual efforts are aligned with company strategies. Employees and managers monitor and focus on their goals and there is a heightened sense of visibility and accountability in performance evaluation.
One company that benefited greatly from this SaaS platform is Nissan North America. Nissan has an aggressive long-term growth strategy and needed to ensure its managers had the tools they needed to track and place the right employees in the right positions. SuccessFactors allowed Nissan the flexibility to create varying metrics tailored to individual departments (i.e. engineers were

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