Being SaaSy has its challenges!!

By.S.Suren :

We have some top ERP vendors entering the SaaS ring with their set of application suites, however though many analyst and experts in the field regard this to be the next most important area for software vendors to concentrate, they also emphasis the challenges it bring with it.

Though most of these challenges have been related to technical, service standards, licensing revenue, I feel that an important issue that needs more attention is the client’s acceptability of a solution where they are ready to let their sensitive data reside in a server that they might not have complete control over.

With CRM solutions (e.g. salesforce.com) and certain other business solutions having being operating in SaaS environment, it’s quite understandable to think that since clients have accepted this type of a solution architecture with modules such as CRM which is likely to have more sensitive data, they will not have many concerns with doing the same with their ERP application or will they ??

I guess it would differ based on the clients loyalty to the ERP Vendors, if they have been using the system for a long time and are happy with the solutions provided they would perhaps accept to the decision to operate on a hosted solution, but the level of service standards and solutions given would be the responsibility of the consultancy provider who was involved, so in cases of vendors like SAP, the push to move from a standard locally maintained solution to a hosted solution should come from the consulting partner I would guess.

However, we should not forget the cultures of data ownership in different regions, yes I did say region, its is likely that in some regions clients are more comfortable with being able to see their servers physically and would surely be a bit skeptical about accepting for the vendor to hold their data elsewhere, though there are always likely to be exceptions to this. I believe that this could be because of the laws on data ownership and misappropriation and the lack of strict adherence to them in these regions.

Well, I am sure this subject could well be debated and could very well prove to be wrong with the increasing use of data applications and the impact that globalization is having on these regions, all this I am sure will lead to improvements in all other related aspects, hopefully having a greater impact on the laws as mentioned earlier.Keeping the above in mind, the following is small lists of other issues I feel could not help encouraging being SaaSy:

• · Technical implications of hosting a core business solution.
• · Service Standards – being a hosted solution residing at vendor site, clients will be expecting the service standards to be high.
• · Data Backups coordination with vendors.
• · User licensing considerations
• · For clients, it would be convincing certain stakeholders of solutions such as this.

Hope you found this post informative and useful.

Feel free to send me your comments and suggestions to ssurenlk@msn.com

Have a nice day.

Business Intelligence & Warehouse solutions with SAP AFS

By: S.Suren


Its fair enough that SAP AFS IS in mainly built into modules such as MM, SD and PP but what about the business intelligence modules, such as SAP SEM and SAP BW. It is arguable that these are standard modules and its relevance in the AFS Environment would be determined by the method in which it is used to access the relevant information and project it on a management dashboard; however given an AFS environment what would be the norms of generating such information from SAP SEM and SAP BW?

Let’s look at a few of the areas in which SAP Business Intelligence Modules could be in relevance with SAP AFS IS installations:

Manage Strategic Planning

Given a manufacturing environment SBUs are normally the factory (plants). Therefore critical strategic business level information can be set as KPIs of these plants and can be monitored, analyzed and controlled.

The KPIs measures that are devised can be turned into financial relevant information, such as SBUs Revenue/ Cost of Production of a particular sales order style etc. This information would form the base for calculating ROCE and making comparisons possible with target rates.

Based on the planning and forecast of possible sales order the user can use this projection to compare information such as SBUs ROCE, RM Efficiency Usage with targets and the future trends of the type of production activity that will take place for the next 10 years etc.

Since in AFS the inventory management function plays a key role, information on stock value and working capital management is crucial. Using information such as stock holding days, lead time in receipt of payments etc, and SAP BI tools could perhaps provide a clear guide on the current efficiency of these functions and help in analyzing problematic areas.

The SBU information can be analyzed together and therefore form company wide figures to make it possible to keep track of strategic goals set company wide. Keeping this in mind lets move on to the area of Analyzing operations.

Analyze operations against strategic goals

The operations in the relevant SBU need to be maintained. All issues such as supply of raw material to the plants can be monitored and strategic decisions can be made.

SAP BI tools could help to obtain a timely insight into making strategic decisions. This is brought to the attention of senior managers via dash boards etc. Using this output the top management have a snapshot view of how the strategic decisions made have contributed towards the results achieved.

Monitor KPI

As per the present needs in the AFS Industry, BI tools could serve the purpose of monitoring KPIs on a regular basis and project those using Management Dashboards.

KPIs from Production Floor Operations to lead times of receiving payments from customers can be monitored and projected using the Management Cockpit option. The definition of KPI’s, Performance Measures & Objectives is what would reflect the usefulness of the SAP BI solution.

Business critical information such as :

• Write off values occurring at SBUs.
• The Idle time of Raw Material and its relevant holding costs can be monitored and controlled.
• Quality Defects % or Numbers per cluster of garments produced can be analyzed in comparison to target rates.
• On time deliveries done at SBUs can be monitored and projected on management dashboards using speedometers, graphs and/or tables.

The main criteria that would determine the successful implementation of a proper SAP BI solution would be the ability to retrieve relevant data using the various data sources available in the organization.

Respond to business needs

If you are the seller you can identify the sales for the different regions and different product lines perhaps based on the type of style sold and the different stature groups. As in AFS the statures can be maintained in many age groups, this could also be used as a measure in determining the target market and identifying trends.

Hope this post gave you an introductory insight into the potential of a SAP BI solution in the context of a SAP AFS installation, however, more importantly as the KPI’s and Measures that could be setup in an AFS environment are in abundance, its all about identifying and prioritizing them accordingly.

Also note that this post is just to emphasis on the different potential areas SAP BIW could add value to the SAP AFS solution, the best approach and method to do it; I will leave it to the technical experts in the subject.

Your comments are welcome at ssurenlk@msn.com

Have a nice day!!

S.Suren

Dying Applications !!

By: S.Suren

The phrase "Dying Application" is something that most often is discussed by ERP Vendors in seminars and workshops as a method of getting customers to upgrade or do a transformation from their legacy systems to the ones being proposed by the ERP Vendor.

In my previous posts, I had mentioned how the general analysis on the ROI of ERP Implementations has been and how much of the actual life of an ERP System is used at its potential by the business. This article would fill in some of the questions of how you might classify a dying application and decide that its time to review the existing processes and consider new one.

I've listed below some of the symptoms of a dying application :

• Users begin requesting for reports that have no base KPI attached to it - This normally happens when the higher level user in charge of the operation that needs to be performed in the module is not directly involved and hence leaves it up to the lower level users to request reports. This costs previous time and money for the business, which could have been used elsewhere more productively.

• The latency of converting raw data entered in the system to structured data for analysis is in days - It is very important for the user of this data to also on a regular basis consider the latency in generating his/her information needs from the system.

• Reports and data grouped as MIS haven't been generated for sometime - It is quite usual during the implementation phase for the user and consultants involved to categories some reports as very important MIS reports and create separate groups for them in the system and special permissions for relevant users only to generate these reports. Once that is done, a formal handshake a sense of achievement rests in everyone, but if you keep a close eye on how often the information in these systems will be used it could be surprising.

• Users spend more time on related applications in generating MIS than in the system - Its understandable that to some extent users will always revert back to excel to organise their information needs, but its important that information that would be reaching higher level users should not be done through excel since it tends to motivate users to use more numbers and details, which shouldn't be the format of reports reaching higher level user.

• The vendors account managers hasn't contacted you for sometime regarding an upgrade or to keep you updated on the latest deliverable of the application - Lets face it, though the blame game is not suggested here, vendors will have to share the blame for a dying application if they have not made any effort to inform the users of the inevitable.

The above points are just a few, I shall update more on this topic in my future posts.

Hope you found this post useful. Have a nice day.

ssurenlk@msn.com

The Big Event this MAY !!

Those interested in watching the big names in the ERP Industry going against each other in one day, make sure to book your seats for the ERP Shoot OUT !!

www.erpshootout.com

I'm promoting this event on behalf of one of my friend who will be involved with this event.

Fashion Conscious !!

By S.Suren



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 in high demand out there, especially given the demand for SAP AFS.

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.

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, 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 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:

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.

If you have any suggestions or comments, feel free to mail me on ssurenlk@msn.com.

Have a nice day!!

My Own Web Environment!!!

Building on from an article I read on the web from one of my favorite bloggers, about the 4 cs that have contributed to open up the web to what it is today, I thought I will talk about this in the context of ERP Solutions.

The web has developed by addressing 3 important C s, they being content, community and commerce.

The initial development of the web was instigating the ability to be able to share information and reach across the globe through a standard medium, this being covered in one of the Cs as CONTENT. The simple idea of being able to communicate and share information with others took a side step and then came about the growing prominence of the other C, being Commerce, where businesses were quickly into the act to see how they can leverage the web with a commercial sense attached to it.

With the growing popularity of commercial websites came the development of some great companies such as eBay etc. Some people would argue that the 3^rd C Community came about before Commerce, but however the sequence, we can always win the argument that websites (e.g. facebook, MySpace) that focused on community have grown to a larger extent very recently than it was during the commercial boom on the web.

The new 4th C which is said to be the next driving factor is Context and is reckoned to be the driving force behind what we could be referring to as Web 4.0, this is the C, I am very interested in given the importance it could have on ERP Web Solutions if properly addressed.

Its all about presenting the information that is available to the end users given his/her information needs. Given that ERP experts would already be jumping to say that this is a simple matter that has been dealt with in preparation and generation of the user interface and reports as per the user needs this can be addressed.

But this is not what I am referring to, a good example of context is what you would find in the websites like Google search page and YouTube, where when you search for what you want, based on your search a list of similar items appear asking you if you would also like to check those out, this is a classic example of creating a web environment that understands you.

Given that ERPs most often have their business intelligence modules built on the web; it is not going to be long before we see context related information being introduced here to. Again emphasizing that this is not the standard requirement of being able to generate and setup interfaces and user authorization to cater to the relevant end user, but the ability to propose and create a web module environment that focuses on the needs of the end users given the information that they are interested in.

I shall elaborate more on the importance of addressing the process of User Interface Optimization in projects in my future posts.Hope you found this post informative and interesting.

Have a nice day !!

ssurenlk@msn.com

SAP AFS Industry Solution !!

By.S.Suren

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 dazzling 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

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.