This is our second Supply Chain Matters commentary regarding the SAP Insider sponsored Logistics and Supply Chain conference being held in Orlando this week. Readers can review our first commentary at the following link.

This afternoon, I had the opportunity to sit with Lori Mitchell-Keller, Senior Vice President of Suite Solution Management at SAP.  Her responsibilities include the SAP Supply Chain Management, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Manufacturing solution suites.

In our discussion, we touched upon a number of broad topics. They included the contributions that the solution management teams fulfill for SAP, the planning for HANA enabled applications within the future of SAP’s SCM and Manufacturing suite, SAP’s recent solution extension that involves ICON-SCM, and some potential SAP customer confusion related to SAP’s Rapid Deployment Solution offerings related to SCM processes.

SAP SCM focused customers may have noticed that SAP is moving toward broader integration of SCM focused applications with various other SAP applications that include SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence, SAP Performance Management, and other SAP Business Suite and ERP applications.  This effort began almost two years ago under the umbrella of end-to-end process management, and now transitioning into various Rapid Deployment Services (RDS) packaged solution offerings that provide customers the ability to implement in manageable intervals of defined scope functionality.  In our discussion, we specifically touched upon some messaging confusion related to SAP support for S&OP, in that there is already an SAP S&OP support application (Level 1) in release status.  A level two version of S&OP that incorporates more elements of HANA is scheduled for later this year. Supply Chain Matters advises SAP customers to make specific inquiries among their respective SAP account and SCM specialty sales teams to ascertain each of the distinct offerings and release timetables, including S&OP support.  Attendees at this conference should also take the opportunity to seek additional information from various SAP and partner representatives attending this conference.

On the topic of SAP of SAP Supply Chain Response Management, Ms. Keller clarified that there are actually two distinctive parts of ICON-SCM functionality, Response management and Collaboration Management.  SAP has licensed the Response Management functionality of ICON, which has been positioned as a prime integrator with SAP APO SNP to provide customer increased capabilities to perform what-if scenario analysis of supply chain plans and to better respond to unplanned events. As we noted in our initial commentary, SAP moved at an uncharacteristic light speed pace to acquire and integrate this specific part of ICON-SCM.  Keller reiterated that SAP Supply Network Collaboration (SNC) remains SAP’s prime application for supporting collaboration and coordination of a customer’s external supply chain. That stated, there is bound to be continued confusion and SAP teams will need to continue their product roadmap educational outreach efforts.

Stay tuned for our continued Supply Chain Matters and SAP Insider commentaries regarding this week’s conference.

Bob Ferrari

I’ve arrived at the SAP Insider sponsored Logistics and Supply Chain conference here in Orlando and was pleased to observe lots of attendees from many different organizations. This combined SCM-PLM-Manufacturing conference attracted 1700 registrants and it appears by my eye that most have arrived.

Today’s sessions were jam packed.  In addition this morning’s keynote address delivered by Richard Campione, SAP’s Senior Vive President for Suite Solution Management, I managed to sit-in on a number of informative sessions throughout the day.

In one session, Transforming your internal and external manufacturing operations into an integrated responsive network, Michael Lipton of SAP provided a detailed overview of the SAP’s end-to-end process deployment functionality addressing manufacturing network planning and execution.  SAP had embarked on a two-year effort to develop and implement cross-application support offerings that are tied to broad end-to-end processes such as manufacturing network planning.  It was interesting for this author to finally get a look at how the various SCM and manufacturing application components have been integrated in various scenarios to support network planning, outsourced manufacturing or material supply and replenishment.  In this presentation, Mike also touched upon the brand new offering of SAP Supply Chain Response Management, a termed solution extension that utilizes certain what-if planning and rapid response capabilities from third-party provider ICON-SCM.  There has not been a tremendous amount of external communication regarding this new extension, which now appears on the SAP price listing and includes dedicated SAP level one and two support. I was somewhat surprised at the amount of initial integration that has already been incorporated to SAP APO SNP.  Mike has a more detailed presentation scheduled later in the week should draw a lot of attendance.  Some SAP customers may be initially confused as to whether SCRM overlaps in functionality with SAP Supply Network Collaboration (SNC).  I managed to get some clarity to that question which will be outlined in a later commentary regarding my one-on-one interviews with SAP executives.

One other interesting observation from today was in attending a featured discussion forum: How to leverage S&OP to improve demand and supply planning.   I unfortunately arrived late and discovered standing-room only attendance for this session, which is yet more evidence of how top-of-mind the topic of S&OP has become in the supply chain community.  A lot of the interaction was focused on challenges in bringing together cross-functional inputs within an S&OP process and the different challenges within some process vs. discrete industry environments. There was also a useful interchange on how important is forecast accuracy, with the majority of this session’s participants leaning toward good enough, is good enough.  Once you have the best available forecast, concentrate on responsive means to adjust to changing business re-planning and adjustment needs.

Supply Chain Matters will provide ongoing commentary from the SAP Insider SCM conference so stay tuned for further updates.

Bob Ferrari