SAP Product Lifecycle Management (SAP PLM) provides you with integrated solutions to support all of your company’s necessary end-to-end business processes. During the different stages of their lifecycles, software solutions can provide the required practices and advantages you need to succeed in today’s rapidly changing world.
This book provides you with an overview of SAP’s solutions to manage your company’s products, projects, programs, and assets. It shares insight into the different solutions that SAP PLM offers and shows how your organisation can benefit from implementing it. The book describes the supported business processes, functions, and features of the solutions so you can evaluate whether a solution is relevant for your organisation.
Highlights
• Product strategy and planning
• SAP Product Portfolio Management (PPM)
• SAP Governance, Risk, and Compliance
• Product development and innovation
• Product data management
• Plant Maintenance and Customer Service
• Product compliance (SAP EHS Management)
• Project management (PS, IM and PPM)
• Product quality (Quality Management) and change management (Engineering Change Management)
• SAP Fleet Management
• Mobility within SAP PLM
• Reporting and analytics (ECC, BI and BO)
This book is your one-stop overview of SAP Product Lifecycle Management covering:
1.Product Lifecycle Management
The book starts off with an introduction to SAP and its product portfolio and discusses how SAP PLM fits into this picture. It explains the history of SAP ERP and SAP PLM, outlines trends and challenges that customers face today, and gives insight into how your organisation might be able to benefit from implementing the SAP PLM solution. Note that if your company seeks to introduce the SAP PLM solutions gradually instead of all at once, you can find the benefits specific to the solution in their respective chapters.
2. Product Management
This chapter focuses on the first stage of developing a product: the product strategy and planning phase. You’ll learn how to manage your own product portfolio and how ideas and concepts for new products can be tracked, investigated, and followed up by activities for new product introductions and how processes for post-launching can be formalised. It includes the management of product compliance, risk, and policies as well as protecting product intellectual property.
3. Product Data Management
Product-related data and project-related data know no departmental boundaries; it’s collected throughout all phases of the product lifecycle, from when the first product idea is formed until the product is delivered to the customer. This data is used and changed continuously by various users along the supply chain. Within the SAP PLM and SAP ERP data model, different master data objects can be used to support all relevant parties with the necessary product information in a timely matter.
This chapter explains the main master data objects used within SAP PLM, such as the product master, routings, Specification Management and Recipe Manage¬ment, SAP DMS, classification, and product costing. Lifecycle data management is a key part of an SAP PLM solution and should be considered its foundation. Downstream processes leverage integrated master data maintenance tools such as the product browser, the Engineering Workbench, and the Integrated Product and Process Engineering (iPPE) Workbench.
4. Product Variants, Classification, and Collaboration
The first section focuses on how to manage complex, highly variable products through Variant Configuration, which gives you the functions to reflect those in a flexible way (i.e., with minimal master data maintenance effort) and the ability to configure the products according to individual customer requirements. The last section outlines the different end-to-end processes available for product data to enable effective and efficient product collaboration among the different stake¬holders, such as product development and engineering.
5. Maintenance and Customer Service
This chapter gives you an overview of the master data and the processes available through both the SAP Plant Maintenance (SAP PM) and SAP Customer Service (SAP CS) components. SAP PM is focused on the master data and maintenance processes of the technical objects (often referred to as company assets) for which you are responsible and are often for company-owned or leased assets. SAP CS focuses on the master data and processes available when performing maintenance activities in a customer environment, where activities can include customer con¬tract management and invoicing the customer for these performed activities.
6. Product Compliance
This chapter discusses the functionalities offered within SAP Environment, Health, and Safety Management (SAP EHS Management) component. SAP EHS Management helps you address global regulatory compliance as well as cost-effectively identify, manage, and mitigate global environment, health, and safety risks by taking an integrated approach to Operational Risk Management. The goal is to provide a reliable solution in a market environment with the increasing importance of corporate responsibility and sustainability.
7. Project Management
A discussion of project and resource management capabilities will give you a solid understanding of the business processes that are covered, from a project’s initiation to its delivery to the end user, whether this is an external customer or your own organisation. This chapter explains how to ensure that you spend and distribute your limited resources wisely and in alignment with your company’s strategy. This chapter teaches you how to gain insight into your project pipeline, how to provide the right information to make informed decisions during all phases of a project, and how to monitor costs and make accurate, up-to-date fore¬casts. Both the SAP Project System (SAP PS) and the web-based SAP Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) solutions are explained in detail.
8. Product Quality and Product Change Management
Chapter 8 discusses two separate components: SAP Quality Management (QM) and SAP Engineering Change Management (ECM). Both are integrated, play a key role during all phases of a product’s lifecycle, and are fundamental parts of the SAP PLM solution suite. QM capabilities ensure that your products conform to predetermined quality standards and allow you to perform quality checks during all of the different product phases and stages. ECM capabilities can be used when any changes need to be formalised and managed for a product, for other objects such as bills of material (BOMs) or routings, and for documentation.
9. Fleet Management & Mobility
Chapter 9 covers two additional topics that are often part of an SAP PLM implementation: fleet management and mobility. SAP Fleet Management manages your company’s diverse vehicle fleet. The second section provides a functional overview of the SAP Mobile Platform solution offering by explaining the current mobile solutions and applications as well as providing insight into the future direction of SAP Mobile Platform.
10. Product Insights and Analytics
This chapter provides an overview of what SAP offers for product intelligence by explaining the searching capabilities, SAP Visual Enterprise, and the end-to-end reporting processes. Reporting on product data is discussed by first explaining the standard reporting options within SAP ERP, followed by how an organisation can benefit from implementing additional reporting tools, such as the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) and SAP BusinessObjects. It shows some examples of these reports and provides details about the standard content that is available for SAP PLM as of this book’s publication date.
11.Conclusion
This chapter provides summary and take-away points for each of the chapters and includes information on what you should be able to do after you’ve read the book.
Author :
Hanneke Raap is a senior consultant at SAP with 15 years of project experience in the areas of Product Lifecycle Management and Supply Chain Management. As a colleague, I had a chance to work with the Author, she is one of the knowledge bank for SAP PLM.
http://www.sap-press.com/products/SAP-Product-Lifecycle-Management.html
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