Apsia and SAP France have announced that they are supporting Team Vitality in its digitalisation. The European leader in esports relies on SAP solutions to accelerate its international development.
When Big Data rhymes with e-sport
The world of sport can be considered a complex system in which many players interact, including athletes, sponsors, coaches and fans. The objectives of a club are to increase the performance of its teams but also to ensure long-term financial profitability in an increasingly competitive environment. This model can be seen in high-profile sports with high business stakes such as football, basketball, tennis, etc., but it is also confirmed in esports, whose growth and attractiveness are no longer in doubt.
As the innovation and data analysis partner of professional sports organisations such as the NBA, WTA, Team Liquid and FC Bayern, SAP is intensifying the scope of its ERP offering in esports. In addition to managing player performance, SAP is also looking to engage fans with its innovative technologies. Integrating financial management and marketing engagement tools, SAP is strengthening the competitiveness of esport teams by accelerating their digital transformation. And why not go down the path of the “Digital Athlete” tomorrow?
It is in this context that the collaboration with Team Vitality was born.
Team Vitality, a dazzling development
Founded in 2013, Team Vitality is the most important French representative on the international esport scene. As in traditional sports, the team has now become a brand in its own right with several million fans. Over time, Team Vitality has developed advanced marketing and created important partnerships with major international brands. Team Vitality now offers a full range of merchandising from official jerseys to high-tech accessories and a clothing line. Its business model is based on online sales but also on points of sale and meeting places for its fans, which it plans to set up in several large cities in France and Europe. The company currently employs around fifty people.
SAP to structure its financial growth and reassure its investors
To boost its growth, Team Vitality has been raising funds for several years. The brand also relies on the best technologies to effectively manage its growth, on SAP to support it in the financial management of its activity and on APSIA to assist it in this digital transformation. Team Vitality relies on 3 key SAP solutions:
- SAP Business By Design, a cloud-based ERP to optimise the management of finance, purchasing and stocks.
- SAP Cloud Platform, an integration and extension platform to facilitate exchanges with the company’s ecosystem.
- SAP Analytics Cloud, a multi-source augmented analytics solution to optimise and accelerate decision making.
Easier business management
The use of the three SAP solutions allows Team Vitality to optimise all of its processes. More specifically, five aspects of business management are impacted:
- Easier tracking of key elements in partnership and supplier contracts.
- Improved data management: better tracking of flows thanks to a single, reliable source of information, making it easy to meet the various contractual and legal constraints (audit of accounts, RGPD, etc.).
- The automation of certain tasks such as the payment of certain suppliers or the accounting of certain recurring flows, thus saving considerable time.
- Better knowledge of the company’s financial flows in a context of strong growth in the number of flows and regular development of new activities.
“We have several business models in one: we do retail sales via our website, we develop marketing contracts with different brands and we also generate content. It was therefore necessary to have several tools grouped together in a single, easy-to-access interface to be able to manage all of these activities,” explains Sonia Manueco, CFO at Team Vitality.”
A long-term collaboration
In the long term, Team Vitality wants to take the use of SAP solutions even further to impact all branches of the company and support its international development. For the fourth quarter of 2020, Team Vitality plans to interconnect the webshop with the company’s various workflows to improve the quality of order tracking and improvement.
“Thanks to SAP, we have all the components we need to go even further: we want to improve further on the operational side by automating all of our legal, quality and logistics processes. The long-term objective is also to exploit all the data we collect on our platforms such as Twitch and Twitter to be able to make the link between interactions with our fans and purchases on our webshop”, concludes Franck Boniface, COO at Team Vitality.”
