Supporting demand driven supply chain with SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions for Supply Chain (Part 1)

[DoreenBaseler]

Welcome to the era of pre-packaged supply chain solutions
Consider this: You are in the midst of yet another software implementation project: Endless discussions on the scope to be implemented, budget constraints to be taken into account, project timelines that don't seem to meet the fast pace of your business – making you anything  but a competitive supply chain player … Sounds familiar?
Now, let’s picture another scenario: Consider if there were solutions with …

 

• A predefined software scope, designed by supply chain experts to incorporate SAP best practices that, combined, meet your needs with minimal adjustment


• A predefined timeline in which you knew how long it would take to implement your supply chain solution


• A predefined price that included everything you needed: SAP software, services, best practices and enablement to help you control your deployment project budget, schedule and solution scope.

Here is the good news: SAP and its partners provide these pre-packaged offerings. Called SAP Rapid Deployment solutions (RDS), these innovative packages help you minimize implementation risks with a guaranteed timeline and predictable, up-front costs. Those are important when you’re making supply chain management changes.
Let me take you on a journey to explore SAP Rapid Deployment solutions for Supply Chain in a series of blogs, starting with a short portfolio overview, here, and blogs that detail the portfolio offerings, later. We will be, profiling selected packages for demand-driven supply chain and their business value, and pointing out how to get started in the weeks to come. This first part will concentrate on:

 

SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions for Supply Chain - What does SAP offer?
Customers can pick and choose from about various rapid-deployment solutions in the supply chain management domain. Most of them are designed as implementations to take your new supply chain management solutions live in weeks. While most are start-to-finish solution implementations, some of them are used as sandbox implementations that facilitate your ability to test the packaged best practices solution and, based on that outcome, define and build your own solution. The portfolio is listed below.

Portfolio of released SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions for Supply Chain

 



    Portfolio of released SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions for Supply Chain

 

You can choose from dedicated packages for supply chain monitoring, such as packages for global batch traceability to track a product batch genealogy and related tracked objects, including delivery items and orders, across multiple SAP and non-SAP system. SAP also offers rapid-deployment solutions in the area of transportation management and extended warehouse management.
Because planning is so important to supply chain management, SAP offers packaged solutions for demand driven supply chain that focus on different planning dimensions (demand planning, supply network planning, planning to advance your production scheduling) and on incorporating demand signals into demand planning activities. Collaboration has become a big topic in business, and SAP has packages that serve as enablers for supply chain collaboration of your company with customers and suppliers. The sales and operations planning package facilitates alignment between the demand plan and the supply plan, reconciling the plans with the financial plan, and then updating the sales and operations plan. Applying SAP Service Parts Planning rapid-deployment solution gives you a quick start to customer-centric service parts management by providing the right service parts in the right quantity, place, and time.

With more than 15 supply chain-related solutions, the question might be “Where do I start?”

 

Demand-Driven Supply Chain
The focus of this blog series will be on rapid-deployment solutions for demand -driven  supply chain. What are the greatest trends and challenges in this domain? Customer insight. First and foremost, companies need to understand what their customers want, when they want it, and to respond quickly to this demand. That covers a lot of ground. Let’s focus on one: The most prevalent supply chain challenge is the lack of clarity into customer needs and fostering their needs in a timely fashion.
In a demand-driven model, companies nowadays use various data, for example point of sales data, social media, and market research data to sense customer demand signals immediately and to respond in real time to build that demand into the planning processes. This accelerates supply chain processes and reduces planning cycle times, working capital and lead times. It also provides the opportunity to increase revenue by avoiding stock outs, increasing promotion effectiveness and optimizing new product launches.
SAP has multiple rapid-deployment solution offerings for demand driven supply chain:

 

• Demand signal management


• Demand planning


• Supply network planning


• Advanced production scheduling


• Global available-to-promise check

 

Each one of the solutions addresses an important part of the demand driven supply chain. In future blogs, we will cover all 5 topics in more detail.