Archive for August, 2007

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

31 Aug, 2007  No Comment

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

This is http://www.sapafs.net

Know exactly what you want. More output means more input

26 Aug, 2007  1 Comment

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.

This is http://www.sapafs.net

SAP AFS Additions

18 Aug, 2007  No Comment

Something New !!

Hi All,

In this post, I thought I’ll discuss just a few of the many functionalities that come along with a SAP AFS Solution.

As you would have guessed, in this industry as garments are produced within a production process it is only obvious that, the materials are likely to be in many different forms before being completed as a finished garment. Given the nature of the materials, the production methods and the complex logistical functions that exist in this industry, let’s have a brief look at how SAP AFS IS supports these requirements.

  • Logistic Area – With the ability of maintaining and defining AFS Specific related delivery items and delivery categories, it makes it easier to coordinate the procurement and deliveries of items, a function that is crucial in making sure production and deliveries meet the deadlines.
  • Purchasing – Document numbering and rounding up that can be done with the special BADI (Business Add Ins) that is available in the AFS Solution.
  • Production & Planning – With the need to maintain and work with materials that take different forms throughout the production process and the importance of having a close track on these materials so that they can be monitored throughout the production process, SAP AFS functions such as, the ability to define MRP modules to control category assignment, the feature of maintaining AFS Special stock types for MRP and being able to define the AFS Specific control parameters both plant wise and material wise.

In my future posts, I shall discuss on critical processes that SAP AFS provides and how best to make use of them!!

Have a nice day!!

S.Suren

ssurenlk@msn.com

This is http://www.sapafs.net

SAP AFS – Intro !!

16 Aug, 2007  No Comment

Fashion Conscious!!!

Fashion is one thing that will never stop changing, there are designs being churned out just about everyday, a new design needs to go through the entire cycle from design to development to delivery at the shortest time possible to make sure the market is still there for it, that’s how fast paced this industry is.

What more, with the complexity of having different customer demands from different regions and to match and satisfy this, it just makes the whole process more cumbersome and to say the least, close to creating a chaotic situation.

The many demands of the AFS industry places a crushing strain on the IT system that is to support it, which is why it is very important that the right IT System that can withstand this pressure is selected for the job.

With the general perception that any IT system that would cater to this requirement is likely to be complex too, let look at what SAP has to offer with its unique Apparel & Footwear solution.

First of all, we need to understand that SAP AFS Solutions in itself is a new addition comparatively to the other SAP Industry Solutions available. However, it is one of those solutions that have come through leaps and bound to cater to the requirement of an industry that demands a lot. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to many when SAP AFS Consultants are the ones in high demand out there, especially given the demand for SAP AFS out there.

Enough of the pep talk I guess, lets get to the facts now!!

Take for example a NIKE T-Shirt which has 3 different fabrics, more than 3 colors, many NIKE swooshes (by the way this initially cost the NIKE Founders $35 to get it done) with an excellent finish to it, a cool hang tag, a stunning heat seal and of course, the price tag attached to it.

Remember, all these items in the Nike T-Shirts were miles apart from each other, perhaps in different continents to say the least, just maybe a few days before it arrived at the store.

Now imagine the amount of coordination and commitment that would have gone into producing this finished good, that’s where SAPs AFS Solution comes into the picture.

The SAP AFS Solution provides the right tools to manage your entire supply chain from the initial purchasing of raw material to the final delivery of the finished product.

It supports the large amount of transaction processing in the system that is only normal in this industry. The Bill of Material would have at least a 6 level hierarchy for a simple one piece garment with no designs or maybe even no buttons, I’ll let it to your imagination to guess the structure of a BOM for the Nike T-Shirt mentioned above.

SAP’s AFS Solution helps in maintaining the right on time coordination with suppliers and customers, the different agreements laid out with them and the most effective purchasing and payment integration methods.

It is also of utmost importance that the right planning tool is made available in this environment so that production and procurement are done right on time to meet the deadlines, using SAP AFS PP, MM and SD, with the flexible master data structure it is simply a matter of defining dimensional matrices with an unlimited number of dimension combinations for purchasing, production, and sales.

Inventory & Warehouse Management are other 2 very important areas in which the SAP AFS Solution stands out, given the nature of the industry where a low value item such as a plain white button could be eating up a high amount of overhead and holding costs, it is only obvious to make sure that these items are brought in only when they are needed, if this is just for buttons, how important would it be to track 100s of layers of fabrics brought in for production, that’s precisely where you would want a system to keep you on the dot !!!

With world famous brands such as Adidas, Reebok, Fornari and Triumph in their customer lists, it just goes to show how highly the SAP AFS Solution is regarded.

References:

Mr. Karen Peterson, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said “no other major application vendor offers a packaged suite for the apparel industry.”

In my future posts I shall discuss on how Customer Management and Business Intelligence Management is catered to in the SAP AFS Solution.

Have a nice day!!

S.Suren

This is http://www.sapafs.net

SAP Apparel and Footwear Solutions (SAP AFS) special features – Ability to handle size grids

15 Aug, 2007  1 Comment

SAP AFS offers many special features to its customers. One of them is the ability handle its functionalities according to the sizes. Apparel and footwear trade is based on the size of the product. For an example if we are making a shirt some of its properties will differ according to the collar size of the shirt to be produced. For an example the cuff size of the shirt, sometimes the consumptions of fabric can vary according to the size of the shirt to be manufactured. This is same in the footwear industry as well. So without sizes it is almost useless to have a solution to the apparel and footwear industry.

SAP grids are ideal way to handle the products with size dependencies. Even when the styles, color combinations remain the same size requirement can vary in this industry. For an example size Extra Small (XS) will have a lesser demand than the size Medium (M) in the market. So the demand must have a variation based on the size while all the other features of the product are the same. So all the dependent subsequent activities will depend on the sizes. In the other words procurement, manufacturing and deliveries will happen according to the size wise requirements.

Sizes are important in some industries outside apparel and footwear trade as well. For an example Tyre manufacturing has a size reference. So SAP apparel and footwear solutions have found its place in many other industries where size is a key differentiator.

There are many other ways size grid functionality can be used in SAP AFS. I will discuss this in the future posts.

This is http://www.sapafs.net

A system is as good as its data

8 Aug, 2007  No Comment

I have worked with many users of ERP including SAP. These users are sometimes data entry operators and some times they are senior managers. No matter in what industry or position they are in they have a common problem. They always find the system is wrong and it is not providing the information they are looking for. Some really question the cost put into the system and they do not get return on investment.

Can any system be wrong? Of cause it can be. In that case it is a fundamental problem with the system they use. The system is unable to process its data accurately. If this is the case I don’t think there will be much of a question of throwing the system away. But is this the scenario most of the times?

According to my knowledge we find errors in the systems very rarely. But we find erroneous data entered into the system regularly. This leads to wrong outputs. Managers will not see the real picture of the business just by looking at the system. In this scenario the system can do only very little to help other than validating inputs and some basic and predetermined checks. For an example the system would identify if some one enters “ABC” in a numeric input and throw an error. But it can not stop one entering 11 instead of 1.

User discipline and understanding are keys to the success of any system. For me data is never 99% accurate. Either it is not accurate or data is fully accurate. So think twice when you use the term “System Issue”. It is “your issue” most of the times.

This is http://www.sapafs.net