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

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

Welcome to SAP Blog

22 Jul, 2007  1 Comment

I am Azwath Mohammad a SAP certified consultant in materials management. I am working in a SAP AFS (Apparel and Footwear Solutions) installation currently. My knowledge on standard SAP capabilities with special features of AFS has helped me to sort many problems practically.

I thought sharing my ideas with the world will help both you and me. This is why http://www.sapafs.net/ started

Please note information on this blog comes with no warranties or guarantees. Use this information on your personal risk. These are solely my personal views not my employers.

This is http://www.sapafs.net

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