What’s Your Roadmap to End-to-End Visibility?

If you are thinking of improving your reporting and analytics capability, it can be challenging to know how to approach an implementation. You may be a large organisation with multiple sites, each with its own offline reports and ways of working, or a small organisation heavily reliant on excel to plan. Wherever your business is, a good implementation partner will need to balance the bespoke requirements of your organisation and its current maturity with the best practice solutions for your industry. 

Not sure why you should consider SAP Analytics Cloud? Check out our other blogs on How SAC Supports Supply Chain and Modelling & Visualising Company Strategy Using SAC. 

At Olivehorse, we have several approaches to implementing a business intelligence solution to add value at all stages of reporting maturity. Follow the flow chart below and read the corresponding section to learn how Olivehorse can use SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) to enhance your reporting, planning and consolidation. 

Do you have complex multiple production levels which need to be planned considering constraints at every level? Are you driven by upstream production processes, and the need to ensure that outputs from these are fully consumed and balanced downstream alongside actual demand requirements? 

Introduction

Creating an optimised plan in the short-term considering demand, supply and available capacity at all levels can often prove challenging. This is either achieved in short-term scheduling tools using multiple planning steps, which may consequently end up contradicting each other, or quite often using mid/long-term planning tools to solve a short-term problem. 

Introduction

After due diligence and long planning cycle, the organisation is ready to meet the targets and fluctuations in the market. In second quarter of the year, there are huge orders being placed by the customers such that the demand is greater than the supply. In such situation, some of the orders are not fulfilled. And, due to lack of proper IT infrastructure, the planners are unable to understand the reason for unfulfillment and they are required to do the background checks to verify the reason. This requires a lot of time and efforts. So, what could have been an easier way to understand the reason without investing a lot of time and efforts?

85% of clients who we engaged with in the past 12 months admitted that their scheduling process was more manual than they would like it to be. Do any of these pain points sound familiar?

Resilience and Maturity

Want to grow your supply chain maturity and resilience but don’t know where to start? Unlocking opportunities in your supply chain requires growth, but first you need to know what changes to make and where.

SAC brings your supply chain to life with visualisations and insights

Many businesses we come across already use SAC for financial planning, but few leverage its capabilities to support supply chain. Through linking SAC to supply chain planning tools, Olivehorse has created solutions to support end-to-end visibility by measuring what matters to bridge the gap between finance and supply chain.

Introduction

Big organizations generally have very complex manufacturing scenarios and requirements. One of such requirement revolves around setting up their production process in ERP systems. They may have huge production premise which is further subdivided into various divisions and departments, forming small sublocations within same production facility e.g. automobile production units subdivided into various divisions like Body and Paint shop, engine assembly etc. Generally this requires quiet intensive master data maintenance in mapping the production process in such cases.

In this blog we will be talking on high level how SAP IBP TS Supply helps you in modelling such requirements with spending less efforts on maintaining master data.

Introduction

Demand Driven MRP (DDMRP) is a great trigger to buy/make/distribute in the short-term. But what occurs over the next 1 to 12 months? Supply chains need the visibility over this period of time as well. Can we still use DDMRP? In short, yes!

What is DDMRP used for?

DDMRP is the operational component of the Demand Driven Adaptive Enterprise (DDAE) to deliver inventory and customer service benefits. For further case studies and education, please read this article on Demand Driven MRP & The Demand Driven Adaptive Enterprise.

DDMRP is an unconstrained order release process based on inventory buffers within the Decoupled Leadtime (DLT). These buffers can be sized using historical demand and/or future demand. This will ensure the buffers are dynamically sized. However, DDMRP has no visibility of the capacity available to supply those buffers. Demand Driven S&OP (DDS&OP) is vital to allow us to carry out a supply and demand reconciliation to recommend buffer adjustments to reduce these risks.

The relevant range of Demand Driven S&OP is everything outside the DLT up to approx. 1-2 years. DDS&OP also reviews historical performance of the buffers and ensures the key inputs to buffer sizing (Average Daily Usage (ADU), Red zone, Green Zone) are optimal.

A SAP IBP solution

The Olivehorse DDS&OP solution is built within SAP IBP and therefore seamlessly integrates with SAP Demand Driven Replenishment (DDR). The flexibility of SAP IBP plus the Supply Optimiser allows us to consider capacity constraints, material lead-times across the End-to-End network and calculate buffer adjustments outside the DLT.

Introduction

Any good business will have a strategic plan, but few businesses can actually model or visualise it. Lack of alignment between supply chain planning and strategy is a difficulty that we consistently see, with no clear line of sight across the organisation. This leads to uninformed decision making, which relies on the expertise of a few individuals, rather than a resilient process supported by data. Particularly in this time of volatility, the ability to align through boardroom to shopfloor is what will set a business apart.

Introduction

First introduced in early 2019, the Web Based Planning app is not a new addition to the SAP IBP offering. However, what began life as a limited but useful app primarily to assist occasional users of the system with remote access, has since been steadily improved and enhanced over successive upgrade releases into what is now a powerful tool to enable and encourage collaboration with both internal and external business partners across organisations. Studies conducted in recent years suggest that more than half of IT executives now view the introduction of collaboration software as a high or even critical priority to conducting business*, with cost often being the most significant barrier. As such the Web Based Planning app now represents a huge opportunity within standard SAP IBP functionality for increased value-added activity in the planning functions of your business. This blog will demonstrate how it may be used to facilitate cutting edge best practice collaborative planning with internal and external partners alike.

*Source: Forrester Research report "Setting the Technology Foundation for Your Social Business and Collaboration Strategy