SAP Agile Data Preparation / SAP HANA / SAP BO Lumira in SCM (S&OP / Marketing vision)

[azael_navarro]

Companies improve planning and control through the implementation of such processes as Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) or as FCS, DPS, SCP, ERP and new known trends, where the key driver is realize from integrating ALL company processes with which the executive team uses to manage the business, improving financial performance and integration, including strategic initiatives in the montly IPC management process, improve operation and financial parameters for contingency plans and improve trust, commitment and decision making into the behaviors required to ensure the effective forecasting to satisfy customers with fewer resources, projecting future business with clear "requests" for resources to ensure supply of a product.

Measurement is a rule for improvement as well as to the demand planning process and the accuracy allow to focus in different purposes, should be owned, easily understood, should identify problems quicly, allow us to understand that will always be forecast inaccuracies it doesnt matter if is at the item level, at product family or group aggregate forecast, in Mix forecast for "aggregate" management to know the quality, at Individual item forecast by comparision of forecast versus real product sold or at the overall forecast quality.

To implement the forecast measurement we can consider the measurement vs time, S&OP meeting to understand the entire planning horizon and to stablish outside or inside tolerances for level deviations, or even consider additional metrics: units versus dollars, sales region, total market and market share, accuracy expectations / evaluation with different variables to obtain the "right answer", eliminate detail forecasting through customer linking, effectiveness of the demand planning process and others.

When marketing activities strain the supply chain's ability to meet demand, additional costs are incurred and the impact on the overall profitability of the initiative, must to be consider. Multiple sources to choose satisfy demand of maximum / changeable / potential customer accessibility at a minimum cost becomes crucial, with the management to solve distribution problem through maintaining the right inventory at various locations throughout the chain and the integration of suppliers, carrier, manufacturers, distributors, third-party providers, and information carriers.

After all, to implement the link we must consider some patterns listed below or even via the last specific post with SAP Hybris Strategy (LINK😞

• Many sales and marketing programs actually cause volatile demand,
• Marketing divided into three categories: mass marketing, trade and consumer promotion, as tools to increase awareness of products and to simulate demand for the products.
• Customer requirements consider the market demand, new products, promotions, etc., when in balance SCM capability consider suppliers, manufacturers, transportation, distributors, etc...
• A capable supply chain make to demand (pull), produce most products daily (reduced run cycles), contain reliable systems and daily supplier integration, allow the flow replenishment of customer inventory, synchronize supply and demand and consider same schedules across supply system or supply chain processes by product lines,
• For marketing program evaluation, the managers should look for a balance between advertising and promotion based on marginal-productivity analysis.
• Marketing total cost decisiones is implemented via activity-based costing (ABC) model capable of answering "What If" questions during the promotion or adverstising planning process, which identifies the cost of all activities associated with the marketing project, based on estimates of incremental sales, marketing costs and the cost of various supply chain.
• The key for Flexibility is the timely and visible flow of identical information to all members of the supply chain.

To apply it in a simple example, we can identify the following situation: one company show how costs increase in relation to changes in demand for one SKU. As demand increases due to promotion activities, the supply chain costs which are not included in standard costs also increase. The bottom line impact of the promotion based on incremental sales is not evaluated before the program begins. The true contribution to profit of the program should include both the marketing activity costs and all supply chain costs directly attributed to the promotion.

So we can implement specific tools to analyse diverse business needs as was proposed above (get the link between SCM & Marketing empowerment). Simulating with the same answer documented with the same logic of charts, but now using the information with 3 different SAP new tech proposals:

• SAP Agile Data Preparation: that can help us to analyse, prepare and discover specific information that can be shared to any Business Intelligence proposals.

• SAP HANA database: now a days as in-memory data platform we could store the information that could help us to implement this kind of scenarios with another technologies that store the information obtained outside the Company and after thatimplement the Business Intelligence process required.

insert into "DEV_SCHEMA"."DEMAND_COSTS" values(1,'1','300');

• SAP BusinessObjects Lumira: this was used to simulate the same graphical proposal documented in the second reference (listed in reference section) to identify the relationship between demand and no-standard costs. And with this we solve the business need proposal…

Metodology to create this proposal: all the information here is supported as a personal review process obtaining the information from 3 prestigious authors and institutes (Palmatier / Robert J. & Rhonda R. / SAP), so they are the owners of all rights reserved... The personal work here, was to create a new review structured in my experience alligned to new SAP vision with real and own technical projects worked...

References:

1. Palmatier, G. 1999. Forecast measurement and Evaluation. Vokurka, R., R. Lummus 1998. Obtained at 05/09/2016: http://georgepalmatier.com/white-papers/forecast-measurement-evaluation-palmatier.pdf
2. Robert J. and Rhonda R. Balancing Marketing and Supply Chain Activities, Journal of Marketing Theory and Practices 6(4) pg 41
3. Experience SAP Hybris Solutions by Marcus Ruebsam, Sven Feurer & Team, obtained by https://open.sap.com
4. SAP Lumira: http://saplumira.com/
5. SAP Agile Data Preparation: https://help.sap.com/adp10
6. SAP HANA: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-60338
7. SAP: http://go.sap.com/index.html