SAP Blog

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.

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.