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

(5 MIN READ)

Businesses and their environment are growing more complex by the minute. Despite the many approaches, stakeholders, and circumstances around it, there is one invariable truth: serving customer demand is the reason for the existence of any firm.

This blog is the second part of my blog series on Managing an SAP IBP implementation and Rollout. Please refer to the first part of the blog here.

Challenges pertaining to the goals of the SAP IBP Implementation and Rollout projects:

“Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have and underestimate the value of what they may gain by giving that up.” – James Belasco and Ralph Stayer

I would like to share my learnings on important factors to consider for a successful SAP IBP implementation and rollout that I have unearthed.

Change is a 2-way process in an organization. The classic top-down approach for change is the highest risk to success, as the impact of the changes require willingness and participation from the user-community in the organization doing the groundwork. These challenges could be addressed by a simple training gap or introducing the new tools/processes or bringing a change in the organization and process structure or a combination of all.

(3-4 min read)

During scheduling solution implementations, we often come across capacity constraints which have either multiple dimensions or multiple capacities. Here we will provide a high-level overview about such constraints and discuss potential solutions.