SAP moving deep into the SME Market !!

16 Oct, 2007  3 Comments

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

This is http://www.sapafs.net

SAP R/3

15 Oct, 2007  No Comment

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

This is http://www.sapafs.net

SAP ACRONYMS !!

15 Oct, 2007  No Comment

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

This is http://www.sapafs.net

Using 3D grid option in SAP AFS

4 Oct, 2007  1 Comment

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.

This is http://www.sapafs.net

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

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

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