SAP AFS Solutions for apparel industry

SAP solutions needs money, time and effort. This can be a small investment for some organizations, but for most of the apparel manufacturers and even for some retailers this can be quite a big investment. So in SAP AFS, the cost factor and recovering that cost can be much more significant than in some other industries. As an AFS consultant we should be aware of this.

Apparel trade is very volatile in nature. Markets are affected by many factors and the trade needs to adjust very quickly. Fluctuations can be high and hence the predictability is low. Industry changes day by day. SAP AFS needs to be very flexible in this aspect. Solutions need to be developed in reasonably short timelines. 

With the challenges unique to the industry, the solution development has its own set of challenges. By its nature apparel industry is very labor intensive. Industry also works on a shorter cycle times. Changes are higher between products and even within the same product. All these together creates the requirement for a system which is simple to use, easy to maintain and highly flexible. 

Every SAP AFS consultant must have these in back of their minds when they design a system for the apparel and footwear industry. Simplest systems will run longer with minimal intervention. Identifying the key reporting requirements and key processes and their requirements, analyzing them will give any consultant a good insight to the customer’s requirements. An AFS consultant can add great value in explaining and convincing the customer by weighing their complex reporting and operational requirements against the complexities created in the system and long term sustainability of the system. Simple systems are generally easy to maintain and upgrade. They are very flexible and can be automated easily. 

I will go for a simpler system if it can cover 80% of my requirements, if accommodating the remaining 20% is going to complicate my system by another 80%. Here the customer will have to do some compromises as well. But they will enjoy more benefits in long term like accuracy of data, ease of maintenance and flexibility for the business to grow with a simpler solution.

How to write an InfoSet Query

As I promised last time, I am going to teach all of you about writing queries. There are three main types of SAP queries. They are;

1. SAP Standard query
2. SAP InfoSet Query
3. SAP Quick Viewer Query

For this exercise I am going to create an InfoSet query. We will be pulling data about purchasing which are in three tables using this query. Every step is explained with a screenshot. So I do not think anyone will have a problem in following the example.

When I started taking the steps down and attaching the screen shots to the document, it became too large to be published on my website. So I compiled the data into a PDF document. This is the link to download the ebook.



If you have any question about SAP queries leave a comment or contact me.

Some interesting special features of SAP AFS

At last found some time to write about SAP and SAP AFS. I was little busy last few days. I have been doing some experiments with SAP and AFS special features. I had few fundamental questions to answer for some time. I tried answering them for past few weeks.

In the apparel industry one of the main raw materials is the fabric. Fabrics are characterized with many subjective parameters like color, color shading and the types of fabric faults. On the other hand when it comes to storing of these fabrics we store them in rolls, while all the other transactions like purchasing and payments happens in length(M, Yd) or in weight(Kg, pound) units. Also we have an interesting question in classification of these materials.

I was working on warehouse management module of AFS. And found a simple and creative way of answering one of my questions listed above. In WM I was able to configure the roll level stock handling capability using Storage Unit management functionality. So there is no requirement to have one to one relationship between the roll and the length it contains. We can manage them separately.

It is not possible to have AFS special features enabled in quality management for the AFS versions before 6.0. But the basic quality allocation and releasing and blocking can be made available using simple IM functionality. Although very simple technically this is a very important functional step for the business.

On top of all these I was invited by ITToolBox to start an AFS blog there. So you can read my blog posts on ITToolBox by visiting this link ( The SAP AFS Blog ).

So some thoughts about the future posts. Most of my friends have asked me how they can write a query in SAP. So I though of publishing my next few posts on the topic how to write a SAP query. See you with interesting blog posts in near future.

Another SAP AFS Special feature: AFS Categories

In apparel and footwear industry it is very important to categorize materials based on various common features. For an example if you manufacturer a shirt, it can be categorized into high quality and low quality based on the quality of the product. If you manufacturer the same product for two or three countries the common industry practice is to have the same style, color and construction but the languages on the label, or packing items might vary according to the country the product is shipped. In this case the products are categorized by country.

It is very important to differentiate the different categories of products within the same product range. This is achieved with the usage of categories in SAP AFS. Basically categories can be used to group any set of data which have common features. For an example Quality and Country of shipment are features that can be used to categorize the product manufactured in above examples.

Categories need to be configured in the IMG. Then category indicators need to be assigned to the materials in order to make the materials category relevant. When this is done, the stock keeping strategy for these materials will change. Your stock will be categorized with the category it is assigned to. In other words there will be an additional level in defining stock. For an example if you had a finish good stock in batch “XS”, Special Stock “E” for the order “23000” in storage location “1100” of Plant “1000” with the introduction of categories you can further classify your stock to “Quality A” and “Quality B” for an example.

On the other hand the requirement calculation in MRP will also be based on the category. You can define requirement fulfillment strategy in customizing. For an example you can ask your MRP to fill the requirement with “Quality A” goods and then with “Quality B” goods in customizing.

Category is a functionality which can be used very creatively based on the requirement. On the other hand usage of categories must be evaluated very carefully. This change the stock and requirement creation strategy for the category enabled materials. On the other hand there are some limitations to the category enabled materials. Customizing of categories involved many steps. I will discuss this in my future posts.

If you have any problems you can email me on the email address shown in the introduction. Or leave your question as a comment to this post.

SAP Industry Solutions

By S.Suren

It is a known fact that SAP caters to different industry verticals by providing industry specific solutions. In this post I would like to give you an insight into how these industry specific solutions are developed for the different product offerings SAP have.

For instance when it comes to SAP Business One solution, when there is a need to cater to the requirements of a particular industry vertical, the separate add on for this vertical needs to be purchased by the customer. This add on is often a separate development of one of SAP’s Development Partner who have been doing SAP Consulting for the industry clients. This add on developed by the partner is later sent for approval to SAP AG where the solution is tried and tested before being available as a genuine SAP Add on for the particular industry vertical.

For SAP All in One solutions, that is for the higher end of the medium sized companies, the requirements (best in class practices) of the particular vertical is also preconfigured into the solution. This preconfiguration is submitted to SAP AG by the relevant development and/or channel partner and a certificate is obtained from SAP AG, certifying that this preconfigured solution is accepted to cater to the best in class practices of the proposed industry vertical.

As for R/3, the industry solutions are seamlessly integrated with the standard SAP components. This is then configured based on the requirements of the particular client. Therefore the client when purchasing SAP will be buying the relevant SAP Industry Solution suite.

Hope this post provided you with an insight into how SAP IS works.

Send in your comments and suggestions at ssurenlk@msn.com.

Have a nice day!!

S.Suren

Grid value conversion facility in SAP AFS

This is another AFS Special article in the series on Grids. I have already introduced you to the grid functionality and usage of 3D Grids. There is another special functionality in AFS which solves a unique problem to the apparel and footwear industry.

Apparel is a global industry. Orders comes from one part of the world, manufacturing of raw material happens in some other place and garment manufacturing will happen in another part of the world. Some buyers refer their product sizes as “Small (Size S), Medium (Size M),…” and so on. Some refer their sizes as “10, 12,…). On the other hand some suppliers of raw materials will call Size S as 14” depending on the product you order and the place from which the supplier operates. So every apparel manufacturer faces the problem of communicating with external parties in the same language they do.

AFS has adopted a creative method of solving this problem. This is by using grid conversions. We will maintain grids internally as we identify them. But displayed grid values will differ based on the Customer, Supplier or Material. For an example supplier will refer the product size as 14” and customer will see their document as Size S while we maintain it as ST internally for manufacturing purposes.

This requires maintaining the grid conversion in the customizing. Here in customizing all the conversions will be maintained for Customer, Vendor and Material. Then we have to make the conversions available for particular customer, supplier and material in master data maintenance. If all three are maintained system will take the Customer as the first preference then the vendor and material in last and grids will be displayed accordingly.

I find this function really useful in operation. But again I do not think this functionality is used for its fullest potential. If you are using it and if you have any comments leave it here by adding a comment to this post.

I will show you how to configure this functionality in my future posts. If you have any questions or suggestions pleas contact me on the email in the introduction above.

Birth of SAP AFS

By S.Suren

Many people wonder how SAP AFS IS was conceptualized. There needed to be some sort of an activity that spurred the development of the SAP AFS Industry Solution.

This initiation was taken by Dr.Peter Zencke in January 1996. Dr. Peter Zencke, a mathematician and economist, joined SAP in 1984. As a member of the Executive Board of SAP AG since 1993, he has led major development areas for SAP R/3 and SAP industry solutions.

In January 1996, he called on the SAP Munich development group to develop an industry solution to cater to the needs of the apparel and footwear industries and this was to be delivered by December 1997 and voila the SAP Apparel and Footwear Solution was born.

The new solution was developed in conjunction with such industry leaders as Reebok International Ltd and VF Corp and today this solution is being used by more than 60+ SAP AFS Customers worldwide.

There you go, thanks to initiatives taken by people like Dr.Peter Zencke that SAP Continues to dominate in the world of ERPs and consistently spring out solutions for emerging industries.

Hope this has given you an insight into the how SAP AFS came to be, I shall update more on the future of SAP AFS very soon.

Have a nice day!!

S.Suren

ssurenlk@msn.com

SAP AFS enhancements in SAP R/3 Standard

For any new comer to an SAP AFS Environment, the first question that would pop up, is “What are the new enhancements in SAP R/3 that caters to the AFS Industry?”, in this post, I intend to provide a brief overview of the new AFS enhancements in the SAP Standard R/3 functionalities and thereby help to answer the above.

In IS AFS 5.0, the specific functionalities that have been included in the SAP R/3 are:

In AFS Master Data:

Material Grids (refer to the earlier post on “Using 3D Options in SAP AFS”, by Azwath for more information on this enhancement)

Categories - AFS materials are based on a large volume of data. To order this data volume, AFS uses categories. Categories are used to logically segment materials. You can enter a specific schedule line for a material per grid value. You can distinguish a material by color and size, for example. Using categories you can also order the grid values at different quality levels, customer segments, and countries of origin

Seasons - In the fashion industry, seasons are an integral part of the business processes. Previously, seasons were only available in Sales and Distribution (SD). In SAP AFS, you can have a season at the stock side. It has been enhanced so that it can also be used for Material Management (MM), Production Planning (PP), and Inventory Management (IM).

In Sales & Distribution

Value Added Services - Some of your customers might request that you add customer-specific services to the goods they ordered before they are delivered. Customers frequently request special labels, packing according to certain criteria, or other special services for their goods.

Depending on what kind of service and how complicated it is, you will need materials, know-how and/or more personnel to provide the service. An added service that you provide upon customer demand is therefore not free of charge, but rather it increases the value of the goods that you will deliver. You can calculate price markups that your customer has to pay, to reimburse you for your resources and materials.

You can map these requirements including their costs as value-added services in the AFS system.

Multi-store orders – The multi-store order (MSO) facilitates the mapping of business processes in which a corporation requires goods from you for any number of stores You can process all stores in one single order.

You explode the MSO document in the following process steps. The system creates individual sales documents.

This allows you to make specific and clear changes to the order quantity for certain stores.

Available to Promise (ATP) - The AFS availability check is carried out in the order entry to see whether the desired AFS material is available for the requested delivery date in, for example, the selected color or size. During the order entry you check if there is enough stock to fulfill the order at the requested delivery date. If the order cannot be delivered immediately, the ATP specifies when enough goods are available and confirms this date as the delivery date.

Allocation Run - The special situation of the apparel and footwear industry requires an optimization of the assignment of existing stock to open requirements. If a stock shortage occurs, the allocation run ensures an optimal assignment of stock to the open requirements. The allocation run distributes the currently available stock to due sales orders according to certain calculation logics at a specific time. If the ordered quantities are larger than the actually available stock, you can use the allocation run to reach the best customer satisfaction under the given circumstances in your business.

In Production

Markers Production Lots

Combined Orders - With this function you can group several production orders. The combined production orders can use the same component or have the same operation in the routing.

The functions you can execute for combined production orders include:

• releasing combined production orders at the same time
• posting the goods issues for all component quantities from the combined orders at the same time
• confirming operations at the same time that are carried out for the combined orders

For more information on these features, I urge you to visit http://help.sap.com/saphelp_afs50/helpdata/en/b2/53ae56cda511d2aca20000e829fbfe/frameset.htm

Hope you found this post useful, feel free to send me your comments and suggestions to ssurenlk@msn.com

Have a nice day !!

S.Suren

AFS, is it a Industry specific product by SAP?

Above is an interesting question I have been asked by many people. It is very annoying when someone ask me this simply because I know it is a IS product by SAP. People ask this question since they do not find AFS in the standard IS list from SAP on their site. Actually I faced the same problem when I was doing a research on apparel and footwear solution. With the number of quarries going high thought give you a complete and edited list of SAP industry Specific solutions. I think this will help you, and importantly will reduce the number of quarries from my users. AFS Users we are here…. Hooray…

• Banking
• Defense & Security
• Healthcare
  • Healthcare Providers
• Higher Education & Research
• Insurance
• Public Sector
  • Public Security
• Aerospace & Defense
  • Aerospace and Defense Manufacturers
  • MRO/M&E Service Providers
• Automotive
  • Automotive OEMs
  • Sales and Service Organizations
  • Automotive Suppliers
• Chemicals
• Consumer Products
  • Food
    Beverage
  • Home and Personal Care
  • Consumer Durables and Home Appliances
  • Apparel and Footwear
• Engineering, Construction & Operations
  • Homebuilding
    Construction
  • Engineering & Design
  • Shipbuilding
  • Commercial Real Estate
  • Facilities Management
• High Tech
• Business, Medical, and Consumer OEMs
• EMS Providers
• Semiconductor and Component Manufacturers
• Software Providers
• Industrial Machinery & Components
  • Construction and Mining Machinery
  • Electrical Equipment, Appliances, and Components
  • Engine, Turbine, Pump, and Compressor Machinery
  • Industrial Machinery and Equipment
  • Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning, and Plumbing Equipment
  • Industrial Tools and Metalworking Machinery
  • Lifting, Material Handling, and Railroad Equipment
  • Measuring and Controlling Devices
  • Motion and Fluid Control Equipment
  • Oil and Gas Machinery
  • Semiconductor and Electronic Measurement Equipment
  • Textile, Paper, Printing, and Packaging Machinery
• Life Sciences
  • Pharmaceuticals
  • Biotechnology/Biopharmaceuticals
  • Medical Device/Scientific Instruments
• Mill Products
  • Building Materials
  • Fabricated Metal Products
  • Furniture
  • Packaging
  • Plastics
  • Primary Metals
  • Pulp and Paper
  • Textile
  • Timberlands and Solid Wood
• Mining
• Oil & Gas
  • Upstream
  • Supply, transmission, and trading
  • Refining and manufacturing Instruments
  • Downstream marketing and retail
• Retail
• Telecommunications
• Travel & Logistics Services
  • Logistics Services
  • Postal Services
  • Railways
  • Airlines
• Utilities
  • Generation
  • Retail
  • Transmission and Distribution
  • Water
  • Wholesale Distribution
• Media
  • Broadcasting
  • Entertainment
  • Newspapers and Magazines
  • Premium Content Publishers
• Professional Services
  • Consulting and Audit & Tax
  • IT and BPO Services
  • Commercial Real Estate
  • Business Services
  • Legal Services
  • Staffing
  • Facilities Management

For more information visit:
http://www.sap.com/industries/index.epx

3 Important Settings in SAP AFS Production Planning.

1. Expand Scope of Check for AFS

IMG Path: Production -> Shop Floor Control -> Operations -> Availability Check -> Expand Scope Check at AFS

Activity Importance : Critical Activity

Here you can make additional settings for the control of the availability check (ATP). You can make AFS-specific settings for each combination of check group and checking rule within the ATP.

Checking rule for the availability check

Use 1:

This rule defines the checking procedure to be used for the availability check (or in Inventory Management, the missing parts check) in individual applications.

Use 2:

It defines, together with the checking group, the different MRP elements that make up this key figure in Flexible Planning.

Brief Explanation...

The whole purpose of this settings is to determine the type of availability check that the system needs to carry out and based on what criteria, if for example is we are to do an availability check for receipts of materials, then we can define the settings such that the system checks if the availability of the material comes from production orders or from purchase order, and as for issues, when checking the availability we can define if for example the sales order and dependant requirements are taken into account during the check.

2. Define General AFS Specific Control Parameters

IMG Path: Production - > Material Requirement planning -> Plant Parameters -> Define General AFS Specific Control Parameters

Activity Importance : Critical Activity

In this section you can carry out general, MRP-relevant settings for a plant.

Activities to be done:

Restrict the number ranges for planned orders, purchase requisitions, and planned independent requirements. Specify the SKU horizon and determine the pegging logic.

Brief Explanation...

Once the MRP is run, this creates purchase requisitions or planned orders for the planned order requirements, and the number ranges for planned orders, purchase requisitions, and planned independent requirements can be setup in this setting.

3. Define MRP Modules to Control Category Assignment (AFS)

IMG Path: Production - > Material Requirement Planning -> Planning -> Define MRP Modules to Control Category Assignment (AFS)

Activity Importance : Critical Activity

In this section you define the MRP modules you use in maintaining the category assignment during the planning run. The MRP module is used for the assignment of stock categories to requirements categories.

Example

Module M1 means that the entire stock, all purchase requisitions, and purchase orders that are available for the customer's requested delivery date, are used to satisfy the existing requirements (FIFO - first in first out).

In the configuration you would need to setup the MRP Module and the relevant function module for this.

Brief Explanation....

The MRP module controls the assignment of the requirement categories to the stock categories. Module M1 uses a strategy where all batches of stock, purchase requisitions and purchase orders which are available on the requested delivery date (sales order) and assigned to the stock category, will be used to satisfy the requirement.

It is important that you have a clear idea of the function module in order to specify the setting for this MRP Module.

Hope you found the above post useful. I shall update more posts such as this in the future.

Have a nice day.

S.Suren

ssurenlk@msn.com

SAP, AFS, Developments and lean manufacturing

Interesting topic for a post isn’t it? What all these have to do in the context of SAP. OK we will go little deeper into this. SAP is a giant software which can cater to any clients need regardless of their industry, size or the power to purchase. But always there are some requirements which will be better fulfilled by doing some adjustments to the software. These adjustments can come in two ways. This can be a configuration change or a development. In an industry which has many influential factors and has lesser predictability there are more chances for continuous changes. Most of the times although the conceptual business models remain the same, application will vary. This might trigger different way of capturing data or reporting for an example. Apparel and Footwear Industry is certainly one of these kinds.

You might have seen in my profile I introduce myself as a lean thinker. So I am very interested in lean and its applications. One of such applications is in software industry. Especially when it comes to SAP developments people have the experiences of long timelines and complex developments. But is this the actual fact, or is it the approach we take to develop the programs. If I go through many of the developments I think which were failures they had one or more of the below features;

Give all the requirements before the development start approach. – This will put the customer in discomfort. He knows if he misses something it can backfire at him. So the normal customer behavior is to add all the possibilities to their requirements without checking the necessity for it. So the development gets complex. It gets costly. Data entry and maintenance going to be very difficult even if the development comes through at all. Most of the times this approach takes months of development time, huge amount of testing time and implementing time. But after some time people give it up making the effort a failure.

We have planned; no changes can be accepted approach – This is the next level of the above approach. People will refine their requirements based on the experiences with the time. More time between the requirement capture and delivery, more chances for the change requests. If we are not in a mood to listen to these requirements which often are very important for the successful operation of the software, the end result would be a failure in operation.

People oriented development requirements – People give their requirements and when the person responsible changes the requirement will also be changed. This problem is very prominent for the developments which will take long time.

Having many unfinished developments or an inventory of developments – This will frustrated the customer since they do not see any output for longer time periods. On the other hand we waste actual implementation and on the field testing time of the software.

Lean concepts can be applied in this software development context to avoid most of these problems. This requires a huge shift in thinking patterns and the processes associated. Some times your bellowed documentation steps in the development cycle will be minimized for an example.

Easiest way to overcome most of these problems is to deliver the developments in small and incremental steps continuously. I call this as the “Just In Time software development approach”. Since this will reduce the time taken to in the development cycle, user gets what he wants quicker. On the other hand there is no need for him to give all the requirements at once. This will reduce the complexity involved in development and greatly reduce the combinations in testing. So development will be much more effective and efficient, testing will be very accurate and the implementation will happen in shorter period. Developments will be tested in actual scenarios and hence incremental changes can take place subsequently. End users will be familiar with the developments and change management will be much easier.

In an apparel and footwear scenario changes happen very frequently in the business. So SAP AFS consultants should be able to keep the phase up with these changes and need to figure out the ways in delivering the developments quicker, simpler ways. Lean concepts can help in achieving this objective. In my future posts I will discuss how you can use these concepts in many other areas including reduction of project cycle time.

SAP moving deep into the SME Market !!

Following on from the previous post on SAP R/3 by my good friend Azwath, in this post I thought I'll discuss more on how SAP is looking to show its dominance in the Small and Midsize Enterprise solution market.

SAP currently has 3 Solutions catering to the needs of companies in the SME Segment. Namely:

SAP Business One (also known as SAP B1)- This solution is meant for companies with 10 - 100 employees and a revenue of $5 million to $100 million. and those companies that do not need all the requirements of a complete ERP. However, SAP Business One is deemed to be a fully fledged integrated business management solution catering to all the different processes that a company in this segment would need to monitor and have control upon.

SAP Business One allows small and midsize businesses to grow beyond the piecemeal approach to business software, which prevents many businesses from managing effectively across their entire operations. It features an embedded customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities to ensure seamless integration among sales, service and other customer-facing activities. SAP Business One comes with industry specific solutions too and further enhancements are catered to with the installations of tried and tested add ons.

mySAP All in One (also known as mySAP A1) is designed to meet the needs of small and mid-market businesses, and specifically those with sophisticated business processes and ambitious development plans. This solution is targeted at companies with revenue of $100 million to $250 million and less than 2500 employees. Its the mySAP Business Suite scaled down and preconfigured for specific indsutries.SAP All in One takes extracts from the functionality of mySAP ERP suite and is integrated with all of its internal modules using best in class practice as per micro industry verticals.

mySAP A1 mainly caters to the higher end of the mid-size companies. It has more functions to cater to the complexities and customizations that would be needed in relation to particular unique practices of companies in this end. It is assumed that the implementation of mySAP All in One would normally take 3 to 4 months as per the industry solutions available. This has proven to be one of the most successful solutions provided by SAP , proven by its Market Leader position in the Magic Quadrant as published by Gartner.

SAP AG global strategy with the mySAP All in One solution is to partner up with channel partners who would be using their industry specific expertise in providing consulting and support services for mySAP All in One for their particular industry.

The final and the newest member to the family is :

SAP Business ByDesign (better known as SAP A1S) - This solution is catered to suit the requirements of midsized companies with 100 - 500 employees. Another important thing to note is that SAP A1S is the first to embrace the SaaS delivery model, its important as a up-to-date consultant that you know these terms well, as this is what is going to make up the future.

I should say as my personal opinion that SAP Business ByDesign does have an appeal to it, with its interface and the various ERP Logistical functions it caters too. Its not a surprise that other consultants who got to work on it first hand were quite enthusiastic about it. At present there are many installations and projects bring carried out with this new solution in parts of Europe and in selected industries. SAP AG have some aggressive plans with this new product and sure enough interested parties will be hot on their tracks, and me not being an exception will keep posting with the latest info.

Remember 2010 and 2014 are the magic target dates ...so keep yourself in the game by knowing where to place yourself...... all the best!!

Hope you found this post interesting and informative, your comments and suggestions are welcome at ssurenlk@msn.com.

Your welcome to contact me on “+94 777 880605” for any quick queries.

S.Suren

SAP R/3

There are many people out there who are trying to understand SAP. Although this site is mainly for SAP professionals, I thought of putting up a post on SAP R3 which will help people who are looking for information on SAP.

What is SAP R/3?

SAP standards for System Application and Products in data processing. And the term R/3 defines the SAP three layer architecture. Those three layers are;

1. Data Base layer
2. Application Layer
3. User interface Layer.

SAP is the largest business software provider in the world. They are based in Germany. SAP currently employees more than 40,000 employees and serves more than 41,000 customers all over the world. Total number of SAP users exceeds 12 million in number worldwide.

SAP is mainly an ERP or an Enterprise Resource Planner. It approaches business by covering key business elements from its modules which will be integrated to cater the requirements of the business. These modules are logically and operationally divided mainly based on the functionality. Material Management, Sales and Distribution, Finance and Controlling are some of these modules. Materials Management module covers the supply chain functionality from requirement generation for the ordering, purchasing, logistic handling, goods receipt, stock handling, physical counts, goods issues and transfers and invoice verification. Sales and distribution module on the other hand will cover the order receipt and goods delivery to the customer.

SAP has its main or the standard product along with its industry specific solutions. There are more than 25 industry specific solutions (List of SAP IS) some of them are SAP for Oil & Gas and SAP for Chemicals. These industry specific solutions are fine tuned to cater the special requirement of a particular industry. SAP AFS (which is my blog’s area of focus) is catering the special requirements of the apparel and footwear industry. In this case requirements of the industry to handle its materials in sizes and colors have been catered apart from the standard SAP functionality for an example.

Brief history of SAP - From R1 to R3

SAP started its journey in 1972. Five of the former IBM employees started the organization called System Applications and Products for data processing to give the businesses a standard solution to process their data real time.

The first SAP product was its financial accounting software and it is called R1. Sometime later the R/2 was developed. R/3 started in 1990’s. Now SAP is moving to the world of web and its applications are becoming very interactive and web based.


SAP Advantages

SAP has tons of experiences with them. Almost all the business best practices are built into the system. When a customer goes for SAP apart from the solid software they get the business best practices.

SAP is a fully integrated system. All the modules of the system combine seamlessly. All the processes are linked and financials automatically takes place in the background.

SAP is a robust and tested system. With its 120,000 installations in 120 countries for 41,000 plus customers with more than 12 million users SAP is tested both in terms of time and volume. It is robust and fast when considering the amount of the data that the system processes.

SAP’s support is another key advantage for its users. Upgrading is also possible without much of an effort.

Above are only some of the advantages and services a customer and user will get when they use SAP. For more information visit the SAP.com

SAP R3 is growing fast. So I will keep updating this section. If you have any comments please leave it here or mail me on azwath@yahoo.com


Resources:
http://www.sap.com/
http://www.sap.com/about/company/history.epx

SAP ACRONYMS !!

If you are new to SAP AFS then it is likely that you would come across some of the below mentioned acronyms when setting up configs. Some config help files give the details of these acronyms, while other more common ones lack the detail, this posts is intended to clear out this grey area!!!

A few of the Acronyms that you would come across in the configs of a typical SAP AFS IS Environment

PTO - Pick To Order is a fixed configuration of a product which you need to order. No changes can be done in the configuration. This assumes that there are enough stocks available to be simply picked and assigned to order and the relevant shipment fulfilled.

ATO - Assemble to Order products have options from which the user can configure the final product. This is where options are available for the user to choose from to assemble the relevant parts to fulfill the order. When it comes to defining it as a manufacturing concept, we would define this as a Pull Based Manufacturing technique, where the assembly is done only after an order

SKU - Stock keeping unit is identification, usually alphanumeric, of a particular product that allows it to be tracked for inventory purposes. Typically, an SKU is associated with any purchasable item in a store or catalog. An SKU is not the same as a product model number from a manufacturer, although the model number could form all or part of the SKU. The SKU is established by the merchant.

ATP - The Global Available-to Promise (ATP) is used to provide a global reconciliation of supply and demand. The "Global ATP" SAP component uses a rules-based strategy to make sure that customers receive the service they have been promised.

RLT – Replenishment Lead Time is the time taken from the identification of the need for stocks to be replenished and the actual replenishment received.

OCM - Order Change Management identifies existing procurement elements (production orders, planned orders, or purchase orders) that are affected by either an engineering change or a change to a sales order for a configurable product.

More to follow soon…

Hope you found this post informative.

Rgds

S.Suren

ssurenlk@msn.com

Using 3D grid option in SAP AFS

Sometime back I wrote about special feature in AFS, which is the Grid option. Generally apparel and footwear products contain sizes. This is where SAP uses grids extensively in its industry specific solution. For an example if you buy a garment you will look for the correct size even when all the other qualities like color and fabrication are met. Even for the manufacturer or the retailer it is important to know the size of the product they manufacture or sell.

But SAP AFS grids can be used very creatively in many other ways other than using it just to specify the size. Actually GRID option in AFS can be used with three variables. So it forms a 3D grid. This 3D grid can be used to reduce the number of master data created, complexity of the manufacturing and make the data entry simple.

In the 3D grid you can maintain three important variables of your business. For an example you can maintain size, color and the country of the order. Or you may maintain the size, customer and quality grade of the garment you require. In the case of first example your grid may look like “S_RED_US”. When you create your material masters for the finish good and the RM you can create one material code for a particular style for an example, since you have all the critical variables in your grids you can use it with freedom over and over again. For an example if you have a single dimension grid with the Size as the only variable you will have to create two materials to for RED and BLUE. If you want to differentiate them according to the country, you will have to create two for each of the color to say each material is specific for two countries. So if you have two colors and two countries each you will have to create four materials and possibly four BOM to replicate the scenario. Below is the summery of the example.

MAT_RED_US
MAT_RED_GB
MAT_BLUE_US
MAT_BLUE_GB

But if you have a 3D grid as per the earlier example you need to create only one material. So you can just imagine the time saving with this option. It will also reduce the data load in the system and will make it easy to maintain the system.

Having said that there are some limitations to usage of the 3D grid. Only 8 characters are permitted to be used altogether. That is all the three variables together can not go beyond 8 characters in length. This will limit you from using meaningful grid values in the system. Most of the times it will be required to code the variables used. For an example you may use 01 to indicate size S, 0002 to indicate color Red and 01 to indicate Country US in the above example. So you will enter “01000201” instead of “S_RED_US”. As you can see code is not meaningful to the reader. But standardizing will help to accommodate the longer descriptions to the grid. For an example you will use a four digit number to indicate the color “Dark Blue” in the system which is not usable in the system as it is.

Maintaining the grids also will be slightly harder if the changes happen frequently. But this would not be a problem after a while when all the possible combinations are captured in the system.

It is a tradeoff actually. But I think by using grids effectively you will be able to make the life very easy in terms of data entry to the system. But you will require longer time to familiarize with the usage especially if you have many changes within a shorter time period. Anyway I am still very exited about the concept and think 3D grids have not being explored by many organizations effectively. So if you are interested in SAP AFS explore it, it will be interesting hopefully you will save lot of time and effort.

SAP AFS implementation – Things to remember

There are two types of users of SAP AFS can be identified. One is the brand owners who have built their brand and now basically into selling than manufacturing. Others are the manufacturers of products. This post is based on the business model of an apparel manufacturer.

SAP is a great tool to define the processes of an organization and collect and analyze data. To make strategic decisions with the data collected it is required to collect data at least for three four years.

On the other hand apparel or footwear industries are very dynamic by their nature. Their products and the way they do manufacturing can change quickly. In fact any low tech industry can change the method they do their business easily. There are no massive changes to be carried out.

Most of the apparel manufacturers do not own their own retailing or brands hence are completely dependent on the brand owners. So they have to change according to the requirements of the brand owners.

These are too many factors of change for an industry. A tool like SAP can be very effective if it has the provisions to change with the possible changes of the industry. SAP AFS has covered almost all of the business requirements into its software. Therefore implementation phase and the requirement capturing phases become very important for the effective use of SAP AFS.

People who convey the requirements should be in a position to foresee the changes to the industry at least in coming four to five years. This dose not mean that they should come out with all the scenarios on earth to over complicate the requirement. They should be able to analyze the current requirements and also should be able to see the changes which might take place in the future.

SAP implementations on the other hand should happen quicker compared with the other industries. Shorter implementation lead times will facilitate the organization to accommodate the changes in the business to the system subsequently (Based on the nature of the change). This will make sure people use the system longer than they prepare for it.

So remember it is the balance between collecting the correct requirement and implementing the solutions efficiently will make SAP AFS implementations successful.

SAP AFS Being in FASHION !!

A few things about the SAP AFS Industry Solution!!

It is well known that SAP had an integrated single solution to offer to all industries prior to the SAPPHIRE in 1994/95; it was during this event that SAP realized the importance of catering to each industry individually as all of them had their own unique way of doing business.

This brought into existence solutions that cater to 21 Industries, and one of its latest additions being the SAP Apparel & Footwear Sector Industry Solution. This solution caters not only to the Apparel and footwear but also to home furnishing, product allocation and contract manufacturing.

Given the nature of this industry where trends are created overnight SAP had to design the right solution that would take into account at most the various process complexities that are associated with this industry whilst still maintaining integration across all functional areas of the solutions.

Let’s look at a few things that SAP AFS IS has to offer:

SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT

As most often that not, SCM is at the spotlight again, proving its prominence in the manufacturing environment. With the SAP AFS solution you can maintain and keep track of the entire supply chain from procurement of raw materials to delivery of the final product.

A counter argument to this would be that, this is somewhat of a general comment and all other ERPs also would give you this trackability, however in SAP AFS with the use of specific Material Management Features such as “Source Allocation”, “Quota Check” and” Factory Status” helps with the operations involved in the procurement of raw materials.

Other features such as “Route Determination” and “Subcontracting” contribute with keeping track of operations related to deliveries and subcontracting respectively. Another feature designed specially in the SAP AFS Solution is the ability to use season logic in order processing with the use of basic data such as season indicator, season table etc.

CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT

This term is more affiliated with the service industry environment and given that customers in this industry are among the most demanding, its only natural that there is a lot of attention given to activities contributing to generating customer satisfaction.

SAP AFS provides special features when it comes to back order processing and automatic order scheduling. The other flexible options such as AFS Standard Sale price, factor price and 2 date pricing cater to the complexities of pricing methods followed in the AFS Environment.

MASS DATA PROCESSING

Given the nature of the AFS industry and all the operations that goes into converting a plain roll of fabric into a sexy lingerie that would be worn by the next super model, it is only obvious that the amount of data to be maintained in the system would be overwhelming.

SAP AFS takes this aspect into account by providing a flexible master data structure and helps to simplify the time-consuming mass data change that would take place in this industry.

There are lot more features such as the ability of E-Business models and Enterprise Portal to help with specific operations in the AFS Industry and the importance of Corporate Performance Management Information and how the AFS Solutions caters to this need.

In my future posts I shall discuss the above in more details and other specific features that SAP AFS IS has to offer.

Hope you found this post informative.

Have a nice day. Feel free to contact me on ssurenlk@msn.com

S.Suren

I recommend that you also visit: http://help.sap.com/saphelp_afs50/helpdata/en/b2/53ae56cda511d2aca20000e829fbfe/frameset.htm for more information on SAP AFS IS details.

Where it all started and its connections with the AFS Industry ??

In this article I thought I’ll discuss a bit about an interesting topic that is common to all ERPs.I am certain most of us are aware of what an ERP is and its role in businesses, but have you ever thought of how this came into being and what was its initial purpose.

With this in mind, let’s take a look at where it all began. Like everything else, ERP too had to come through an evolution.

Inventory Management

Initially at the very beginning, businesses concentrated more on the tangible products they had. The product that could be seen and touched was the final product and businesses were concerned about how best they could monitor these to do business efficiently. In order to do this, the business needed to be aware of their physical stocks and how best to maintain them in the most efficient manner. This needed a system in place and hence the term “Inventory Management”. A very famous term that came with the introduction of the Inventory Management system is what we now refer to as BOM (Bills of Material).

The BOM is a very significant term in the AFS Industry as well, simply because of the complexities that come with being up-to-date with the latest fashion trends puts a considerable strain on the proper definition and structure of a BOM.

Material Requirement Planning (MRP)

With the inventory management systems in place, it provided businesses with a track on their stocks, after this the attention moved on towards requirement planning to cater to the needs of production. With the finished goods in mind, there needed to be a system that would help in planning the material requirements in order to produce what was needed and in the most efficient manner.

Hence the term, Material Requirement Planning. In the SAP AFS Solution MRP plays a key role, since it is used in determining the requirements of a finished product based on the BOM and generating the purchase requisitions and planned production orders.

This task was considered cumbersome during the 1970, but as we all know now, with solutions such as SAP AFS its just a matter of executing a single transaction (J3AD) and the rest of the operations are auto executed.

Manufacturing Requirement Planning (MRP 2)

Continuing from the previous process of calculating the material requirements in order to start manufacturing the finished goods, the next significant operation would be the manufacturing process. With the complexities involved with Manufacturing came the need to build systems that would interface with the various operations outside the manufacturing framework such as planning, procurement and distribution with the operations of manufacturing itself.

Given the nature of the AFS Industry, it’s understood that there are many stages involved before the completion of the finished product, and it is a requirement that the nature of the product in these stages are known at given point of time to enable the efficient planning of subsequent operations such as delivery & billing and consequently planning the next production cycle.

Finally…. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Most of the previous processes we looked at were more often than not concentrated on front end operations, this was realized during the 1990 and so came the need to have systems to cater to the requirement of efficiently carrying out backend and value adding operations as well. These operations are none other than what we now know as, Financials, Marketing, Human Resource, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Corporate Performance Management (CPM) etc.

The need to cater to these brought into the existence of systems that were designed to specialize in these separate areas and then to integrate it all into one package, and hence the name ERP.

However, its not safe to make any assumption that this would be the final term used when referring to systems that integrate all aspects of business operation into one single package since the gaining prominence of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SAAS) and Web Portal solutions could very well have an impact on the next term we all would be using instead of ERP.

Hope you found this article informative.

Have a nice day!!

S.Suren

ssurenlk@msn.com

SAP AFS user MAS holdings Wins SAP ACE (Award for Customer Excellence) - 2007

I got great news through Google news. MAS Holdings (Intimates Division) has won the award for customer excellence for the year 2007 from SAP. It is interesting to know the concept of vendor evaluating a customer. This is certainly against the common practice of customers rating their suppliers and service providers.

It is interesting to give attention to the comments by Mr. Jay Keller CIO of MAS Holdings. “It is our goal to facilitate interaction and information sharing at any point in time with all parties involved. For us, the process starts with the idea for a product and ends with the sales of the product to the final customer.” SAP as a tool certainly facilitates integration of information and provide all the people a common language to talk to each other. This will make it possible to seamlessly integrate the process of converting idea to sales to final customer.

Mr. Dian Gomes, MD of MAS Intimates division, for me summarize the purpose of having an ERP. Mr. Dian Gomes in the interview said “This is a validation of our commitment to information technology as a key driver of business value addition. We are excelling in all spheres of our business to provide our customers superior service.”

Any ERP should just do this. ERP should be a tool adding value to the customer. And it should driver to the business. Especially when it comes to SAP it brings years of experience in business and also built in best practices which will be very handy for any business.

This is an important story which tells us if the directions are set properly and if those directions are followed SAP can bring the best result. Commitment, driving and value addition are three main keywords for me in this story.

Congratulations MAS on your achievement.

Resources:
http://www.fibre2fashion.com/news/company-news/mas-holdings/newsdetails.aspx?news_id=40224&page=1

Know exactly what you want. More output means more input

In any SAP implementation the key step is requirement capturing. The solution will evolve on the requirements captured in this phase of the project. What is the attitude of users or the people who communicate requirements in this important step of the project? Most of them will putdown everything comes in to their mind without analyzing whether this is a real requirement of the business or they will take this step very lightly and think these can be altered subsequently.

Actually this is the reason for most of the problems occur in SAP implementations. If the users themselves are not clear on what they want, it is very hard to configure a good solution for them. Especially this is true when it comes to reporting. Most of the users want reports with tons information on them. But when it comes to entering data they are not willing to do it. Most of the times complicated reporting means complicated data inputs. So every user must analyze their requirement before they pass it to the blue printing. Every requirement must be analyzed to check their actual requirement and the benefit in the bigger picture. This is why it is always better to have a group of final decision makers who have the knowledge to analyze the requirement in the bigger picture and authority to make the decisions to filter and pass the requirements to the blue printing.

User requirements should represent the requirement of the business not the managers. In simple terms when managers change, there should not be any drastic changes to the requirements. This might sound funny, but most of the implementations suffer due to this.

Everyone involved in this process of requirement capturing must be educated on the importance of this step. And if they want to do a change to the requirements they proposed during blue printing, there must be a proper channel of approval and reasoning process to the change. Otherwise sometimes the solution will suffer due to the irresponsible actions of this nature.

Simple thing to remember, requirement is the foundation of the solution. If it is not stable solution will certainly not be stable.