Archive for September, 2007

SAP AFS implementation – Things to remember

30 Sep, 2007  1 Comment

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.

This is http://www.sapafs.net

SAP AFS Being in FASHION !!

3 Sep, 2007  1 Comment

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.

This is http://www.sapafs.net

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

2 Sep, 2007  No Comment

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

This is http://www.sapafs.net