Managing your supply chain in spreadsheets can be risky, costly, and frustrating. Discover the steps in SAP to ensure planning and decisions are based upon timely, accurate, and complete data. This session looks at techniques in SAP to begin to trust the information increase the SAP functionality to begin the journey of moving to single system of truth.

• Best practices to establish business rules and standards as well as to manage master and transactional data
• Guidelines to align data definitions across procurement, inventory, warehouse, production, and fulfillment organizations
• Lessons to establish trustworthy inventory-on-hand data in order to use SAP MRP and ATP (available-to-promise)functionality with confidence
• How to locate and use reports that are readily available in your SAP systems to identify areas where data needs to be cleaned up
• Explore the importance of One System of Record to enable operational flexibility, innovation, and velocity

Hands-on Exercise to Improve Data Integrity

Imagine a world of different SCM strategies that can help you increase automation that drives customer service, reduce working capital tied up in excessive inventory and move away from daily firefights. Business rules (master data) are the cornerstone of managing demand and supply effectively, so it’s no surprise that exceptions between business rules and behavior are a leading cause of poor service and fulfillment performance. This session provides insight on how to prioritize activities within the supply chain to remain agile and responsive to customer needs.

• Exceptions – SAP’s secret weapon to moving from reactive to proactive problem solving
• Hear how other SAP customers have established purchasing and inventory policies that ensure their production department gets the raw materials it needs to optimize uptime
• Learn how to create “what-if” scenarios within core SAP systems to help you make better production decisions, automate lot sizes and lead-times, and optimize inventory and service activities
• Get best practices to integrate materials management and production planning activities
• Get expert tips to align exception monitoring activities with service-level targets
• Learn how to integrate raw material planning, sales, and production capacity so that everyone is working for a common and understood outcome
• Find out how to use the exception monitor to determine whether an excess or shortage of raw materials is being routed to the shop floor
• Updates on the pros and cons of centralized versus decentralized master data management, and expert guidelines to choose the right approach for your organization

Hands-on Exercises Utilizing Exception Management.

Having the right product, at the right place, at the right time and at the right available level – every time – is the holy grail of every supply chain. Companies traditionally use historical performance, channel demands, and gut feel to determine product allocation and replenishment planning. However, without proper measures and analytics, this is falling short of providing the right results. More and more companies are starting to turn to predictive analytics to refine this decision making. The challenge is finding the balance between prediction and actual. Learn how to leverage standard SAP tools and reports you already own to reduce inventory averages by more than 20% while increasing the availability of inventories to production and sales.

• Understand the importance of segmentation and how best to establish this principle in SAP
• Target the greatest contributors to high and low inventory levels to achieve reductions in stock outs and improved inventory turns
• Identify the excess inventory in the active/moving parts and where more than the necessary safety stocks are held
• Identify high movers that constantly stock out and to prevent negative service level impacts

Hands-on Exercise on Inventory Analysis.

Whether you are a discrete or repetitive manufacturer, SAP can help improve throughput. Whether you are a make to order, make to stock or assemble to order company, or a combination of these three, SAP can run multiple strategies to meet customer demand and strategic intent. In this session we will discuss the various types of strategies in addition to the finite scheduling and capacity planning capabilities in SAP to ensure not only we measure manufacturing efficiencies but improve it. Discuss the critical success factors to optimize planning strategies, including forecasting and S&OP initiatives that add value to the bottom line. The different demand planning strategies and the importance of applying the right one.

• How manufacturing can proactively react to over and under consumption of demand
• Insight into SAP tools to provide inventory visibility and use of key graphics for manufacturing throughput measures
• How to utilize detailed scheduling and capacity planning to drive improved efficiencies
• Maximize production planning performance and relationships through increased visibility and trustworthy information

Hands-on Exercises for Production& Capacity Planning