By S.Suren
Going for an ERP System requires a clear cut picture as to what is expected out of the system when users have adjusted to it.
Many businesses generally consider that the system will begin to return on its investment from day one onwards but the unfortunately that’s not exactly how it works, click here or general facts on the Returns on Investment of an ERP Implementation.
In this post I thought I’ll list down as many issues and procedures that the business has to address when considering implementing an ERP system.
Don’t wait until the last minute : The moment you know that the reports you need from your present system or manual process is not available at the time they are needed you know there is something wrong. Money is probably draining out of your business, inferior data is building and worst of all you might be making absurd business decisions. Timely information is crucial, so make immediately provision and plans to start assessing a system.
Understand that good things come at a price: Many people decide to go for an accounting or ERP System and then look to minimize as much as possible on the expenses related to it. Now, I am not saying you should be spending freely on a system, its just that you need to understand and analyse how much is the opportunity costs of not having those additional functions done with your new accounting system.
The fact is that, in most implementations this impact is hardly considered because most often the excuse is that, it is either hard or not logical to quantify the benefits or savings, but I’ll say put it down in paper and just keep jotting all the pros and cons of what you do now, and you’ll be amazed at the list you would end up with.
Get your wish list out : Once you have got vendors knocking at your doorstep, make sure you have the right must have points listed in front of you. Generally the case is the higher management team of the clients would sit in at the vendors first initial sales demo and everyone would be looking at what the vendor has in relation to their specific area of work and will be evaluating the system based on how much it addresses the requirements of that area.
Its very rarely that you would have a senior management team have a meeting within themselves to identify and understand that core business requirements that they need to have and must be evaluating the potential vendors against. Most important make room for compromise, understand that the system will not cater to all 100 % of your business requirement, most likely maybe at least 90%, the remaining 10 % try to decide on how best to tackle them, but avoid trying to get the full 10 % customized, that’s the slippery path that could drag the 90% standard functionality backwards.
More to follow soon, hope you found this post informative and interesting. ssurenlk@msn.com.
Have a nice day!!
Jun 25, 2008
A Perfect Plant !!
What Is a Perfect Plant?
It’s an ideal meant to serve as a blueprint for your own manufacturing transformation, helping you prioritize when and where you should devote resources to produce steady, incremental improvements to your manufacturing processes.
In the perfect plant, you have visibility into all aspects of your manufacturing operations. You can optimize your use of manufacturing assets and drive increased production performance — all in concert with enterprise-wide plans and objectives.
In a perfect plant, personnel no longer waste effort constantly reacting to line failures, supply network disruptions, and operations emergencies.
Manufacturing employees can anticipate change and devise innovative solutions that improve production efficiency, optimally use assets, and reduce waste. Information and processes across your production network deliver
timely, context-sensitive, actionable intelligence. Production managers, supervisors, and operators can use this intelligence to plan and drive responsive execution that exceeds your delivery, quality, and cost objectives.
Becoming a perfect plant involves leveraging your investment in enterprise applications, exploiting your existing manufacturing infrastructure and data sources, and delivering simplified business processes to frontline operators.
How to Become a Perfect Plant: 5 Strategic Steps
With your key metrics in mind, the drive toward the perfect plant includes the following core actions:
· Coordinate the aggregation and analysis of global demand. To have the perfect order, you must clearly see demand across every market and tie it into production.
· Integrate data flowing from enterprise applications and planning and execution systems into a single, harmonized flow of information; it’s critical to coordinate across network partners, suppliers, and customers to deliver that perfect order. In addition, having the ability to combine and recombine systems to support new processes — without ripping and replacing the underlying functionality — is the technological underpinning of the perfect plant.
· Plan accurately. Your ability to do so improves immensely when your systems are completely integrated and you have clear demand signals arriving from your enterprise systems. These systems provide real-time updates to keep the plant informed about strategic changes, and automatically relay local events and disruptions to decision makers. This way, the entire company can react more responsively.
· Embed intelligence into your planning and execution systems. Successful planning and execution depends on your ability to parse, collect, and analyze data arriving from the shop floor and present it in context-appropriate forms for plant managers, the vice president of operations, and the CEO. Greater integration with planning systems means the shop floor can adapt quickly to changes caused by disruptions elsewhere in the business.
· Execute responsively by identifying what is important to your organization’s strategic advantage and deploying execution systems accordingly. This means connecting local systems accordingly. This means connecting local execution processes to business operations in the context of your operating environment. Sometimes it’s as simple as providing work instructions to operators; other times it includes capturing detailed information to support tracking and tracing components to their last identifiable source. Ensure that your execution system provides the flexibility you need to rapidly compose new applications and business processes unique to your environment to support any changes in manufacturing operating requirements.
Each industry and customer must prioritize these steps differently. A consumer goods manufacturer might focus on coordination and planning first, as assessing global demand and harnessing it to develop and launch new products is a top priority. A high tech manufacturer, on the other hand, is more worried about rapidly ramping up production of a hot new product, which requires tight integration between planning and execution systems.
Summary
The perfect plant is a new manufacturing paradigm. It’s an idealistic yet achievable vision that helps an organization align its manufacturing strategy with its corporate objectives, and one that helps IT make its technology decisions more strategic. The pursuit of the perfect plant empowers plant personnel, operations, and IT to collectively design, prioritize, and implement plant strategies. SAP is armed with solutions that are ready to help you make this manufacturing transformation.
Source: SAP Insider - Business Process Excellence
I hardly copy paste other articles on my blog, but when I come across something real good its hard not to share.....
S.Suren
ssurenlk@msn.com
It’s an ideal meant to serve as a blueprint for your own manufacturing transformation, helping you prioritize when and where you should devote resources to produce steady, incremental improvements to your manufacturing processes.
In the perfect plant, you have visibility into all aspects of your manufacturing operations. You can optimize your use of manufacturing assets and drive increased production performance — all in concert with enterprise-wide plans and objectives.
In a perfect plant, personnel no longer waste effort constantly reacting to line failures, supply network disruptions, and operations emergencies.
Manufacturing employees can anticipate change and devise innovative solutions that improve production efficiency, optimally use assets, and reduce waste. Information and processes across your production network deliver
timely, context-sensitive, actionable intelligence. Production managers, supervisors, and operators can use this intelligence to plan and drive responsive execution that exceeds your delivery, quality, and cost objectives.
Becoming a perfect plant involves leveraging your investment in enterprise applications, exploiting your existing manufacturing infrastructure and data sources, and delivering simplified business processes to frontline operators.
How to Become a Perfect Plant: 5 Strategic Steps
With your key metrics in mind, the drive toward the perfect plant includes the following core actions:
· Coordinate the aggregation and analysis of global demand. To have the perfect order, you must clearly see demand across every market and tie it into production.
· Integrate data flowing from enterprise applications and planning and execution systems into a single, harmonized flow of information; it’s critical to coordinate across network partners, suppliers, and customers to deliver that perfect order. In addition, having the ability to combine and recombine systems to support new processes — without ripping and replacing the underlying functionality — is the technological underpinning of the perfect plant.
· Plan accurately. Your ability to do so improves immensely when your systems are completely integrated and you have clear demand signals arriving from your enterprise systems. These systems provide real-time updates to keep the plant informed about strategic changes, and automatically relay local events and disruptions to decision makers. This way, the entire company can react more responsively.
· Embed intelligence into your planning and execution systems. Successful planning and execution depends on your ability to parse, collect, and analyze data arriving from the shop floor and present it in context-appropriate forms for plant managers, the vice president of operations, and the CEO. Greater integration with planning systems means the shop floor can adapt quickly to changes caused by disruptions elsewhere in the business.
· Execute responsively by identifying what is important to your organization’s strategic advantage and deploying execution systems accordingly. This means connecting local systems accordingly. This means connecting local execution processes to business operations in the context of your operating environment. Sometimes it’s as simple as providing work instructions to operators; other times it includes capturing detailed information to support tracking and tracing components to their last identifiable source. Ensure that your execution system provides the flexibility you need to rapidly compose new applications and business processes unique to your environment to support any changes in manufacturing operating requirements.
Each industry and customer must prioritize these steps differently. A consumer goods manufacturer might focus on coordination and planning first, as assessing global demand and harnessing it to develop and launch new products is a top priority. A high tech manufacturer, on the other hand, is more worried about rapidly ramping up production of a hot new product, which requires tight integration between planning and execution systems.
Summary
The perfect plant is a new manufacturing paradigm. It’s an idealistic yet achievable vision that helps an organization align its manufacturing strategy with its corporate objectives, and one that helps IT make its technology decisions more strategic. The pursuit of the perfect plant empowers plant personnel, operations, and IT to collectively design, prioritize, and implement plant strategies. SAP is armed with solutions that are ready to help you make this manufacturing transformation.
Source: SAP Insider - Business Process Excellence
I hardly copy paste other articles on my blog, but when I come across something real good its hard not to share.....
S.Suren
ssurenlk@msn.com
Jun 14, 2008
SAP Future Talents in Demand !!!
By S.Suren
As of now it is apparent that there is high demand in the market for SAP Consultants with the relevant domain experience that those that have been just concerned with standard SAP. Having that in mind, it’s also become evident about the increasing demand for SAP Consultants in certain industries, namely the Apparel, Health Sector, Oil and Gas Industry and Financial Institutions.
Latest research by companies such as Foote Partners have shown that there is certain specific SAP Module Knowledge that is in demand at present and that is likely to be there for a few more years to come.
Modules such as SAP MDM, SAP EDI an SAP Business Intelligence are the modules that seem to be in the spotlight as of now. I read elsewhere that SAP EDI is also beginning to grab the attention of those industry that deal with a lot of commercial papers, yes I know every company does have this requirement, but I am referring to those industries where global regulations related to commercial paper requirements need to be satisfied as per the countries operating in.
The saving that companies can make with an EDI system is truly amazing, commercial documents that ones costs hundreds of dollars with an EDI system could cost just about $2 to $3 and its much faster than the traditional method, remember the savings is on all of the additional activities that go into generating and administering of the commercial papers.
Its been forecasted that SAP could face a talent crunch in 3 years time in certain markets since there are not enough university graduates coming out and also the fact that there is a shortage of soft skills available too, which in the ERP Consulting Industry is a key factor in spelling out success.
Its also good to note that, given the above situation, SAP have already gained a good ground in joining hands with universities to develop relevant curriculums to help turn out graduates with the right skills. This programme is known as SAP UAP (University Alliance Programme), which was started off in the mid 1990s in Germany and now has over 500 universities worldwide as members.
There is whole lot more happening with the SAP Business Intelligence solutions after the Business Objects take-over by SAP, these I will discuss in my future posts.
With so much happening in the ERP industry its of vital importance that all consultants make sure that they make the right decisions and keep their ears up against the right doors to make sure that they hear the knocks coming through!!!
Hope you found this post informative and interesting. I will be glad to answer your queries on ssurenlk@msn.com, and perhaps some counseling too!!!
Wish you the very best and have a great day!!
As of now it is apparent that there is high demand in the market for SAP Consultants with the relevant domain experience that those that have been just concerned with standard SAP. Having that in mind, it’s also become evident about the increasing demand for SAP Consultants in certain industries, namely the Apparel, Health Sector, Oil and Gas Industry and Financial Institutions.
Latest research by companies such as Foote Partners have shown that there is certain specific SAP Module Knowledge that is in demand at present and that is likely to be there for a few more years to come.
Modules such as SAP MDM, SAP EDI an SAP Business Intelligence are the modules that seem to be in the spotlight as of now. I read elsewhere that SAP EDI is also beginning to grab the attention of those industry that deal with a lot of commercial papers, yes I know every company does have this requirement, but I am referring to those industries where global regulations related to commercial paper requirements need to be satisfied as per the countries operating in.
The saving that companies can make with an EDI system is truly amazing, commercial documents that ones costs hundreds of dollars with an EDI system could cost just about $2 to $3 and its much faster than the traditional method, remember the savings is on all of the additional activities that go into generating and administering of the commercial papers.
Its been forecasted that SAP could face a talent crunch in 3 years time in certain markets since there are not enough university graduates coming out and also the fact that there is a shortage of soft skills available too, which in the ERP Consulting Industry is a key factor in spelling out success.
Its also good to note that, given the above situation, SAP have already gained a good ground in joining hands with universities to develop relevant curriculums to help turn out graduates with the right skills. This programme is known as SAP UAP (University Alliance Programme), which was started off in the mid 1990s in Germany and now has over 500 universities worldwide as members.
There is whole lot more happening with the SAP Business Intelligence solutions after the Business Objects take-over by SAP, these I will discuss in my future posts.
With so much happening in the ERP industry its of vital importance that all consultants make sure that they make the right decisions and keep their ears up against the right doors to make sure that they hear the knocks coming through!!!
Hope you found this post informative and interesting. I will be glad to answer your queries on ssurenlk@msn.com, and perhaps some counseling too!!!
Wish you the very best and have a great day!!
Jun 11, 2008
Challenges in the Apparel Industry and SAP’s Solutions for them – Article 2
By S.Suren
As promised in my previous posts I have posted this article to give you more insight into the challenges faced by companies in the Apparel & Footwear Industry and how SAP AFS Industry Solution caters to them.
Excess/redundant inventory or Stock shortages/out of stock
This is quite a familiar occurring scenario in the AFS Industry. It is understood that given the variations in demand patterns in this industry it is likely that the related functions of apparel manufacturers such as procurement and production will have to cater to these variations as much as possible in the most efficient manner.
Given this condition SAP AFS has some useful functionality that caters to these needs:
Material Substitution – This is a function in SAP Sales & Distribution that allows substitution of one material for another within a sales order. The importance of this functionality is that by allowing for substitutions during times of more than expected customer demands, the company can avoid lost sales and helps increase and maintain/or customer satisfaction with on time deliveries.
Availability Check – This is standard function in SAP which helps to identify if there is are available stocks to satisfy the schedule line’s requirements based on the delivery date. If there is not enough stocks it would then check when there will be enough stocks available and will confirm a new delivery date based on the availability.
Over/Under delivery tolerance levels is a standard functionality that SAP provides to avoid having shortages or excess stocks in your inventory. With SAP AFS this can be monitored at SKU level.
ATP Check with the AFS Component – With this function you can view whenever the item is either not available or not completely available in the system. With SAP AFS you can view this information from the system on an AFS Overview Screen that shows the availability status at the SKU levels. With the AFS component multiple schedule lines can be checked during ATP runs at SKU Levels.
Reservation in MM – This standard function allows you to make reservations on certain materials so that it can be used at a later date for a special purpose. This way you can avoid the stock outs that could occur in the future when demand is higher than expected and there is not enough specific stocks to meet the demand. With SAP AFS this processing of reservations can be done at SKU Level.
I shall keep posting more on this area in the future. Hope you found this posts informative.
ssurenlk@msn.com
Have a nice day !!
As promised in my previous posts I have posted this article to give you more insight into the challenges faced by companies in the Apparel & Footwear Industry and how SAP AFS Industry Solution caters to them.
Excess/redundant inventory or Stock shortages/out of stock
This is quite a familiar occurring scenario in the AFS Industry. It is understood that given the variations in demand patterns in this industry it is likely that the related functions of apparel manufacturers such as procurement and production will have to cater to these variations as much as possible in the most efficient manner.
Given this condition SAP AFS has some useful functionality that caters to these needs:
Material Substitution – This is a function in SAP Sales & Distribution that allows substitution of one material for another within a sales order. The importance of this functionality is that by allowing for substitutions during times of more than expected customer demands, the company can avoid lost sales and helps increase and maintain/or customer satisfaction with on time deliveries.
Availability Check – This is standard function in SAP which helps to identify if there is are available stocks to satisfy the schedule line’s requirements based on the delivery date. If there is not enough stocks it would then check when there will be enough stocks available and will confirm a new delivery date based on the availability.
Over/Under delivery tolerance levels is a standard functionality that SAP provides to avoid having shortages or excess stocks in your inventory. With SAP AFS this can be monitored at SKU level.
ATP Check with the AFS Component – With this function you can view whenever the item is either not available or not completely available in the system. With SAP AFS you can view this information from the system on an AFS Overview Screen that shows the availability status at the SKU levels. With the AFS component multiple schedule lines can be checked during ATP runs at SKU Levels.
Reservation in MM – This standard function allows you to make reservations on certain materials so that it can be used at a later date for a special purpose. This way you can avoid the stock outs that could occur in the future when demand is higher than expected and there is not enough specific stocks to meet the demand. With SAP AFS this processing of reservations can be done at SKU Level.
I shall keep posting more on this area in the future. Hope you found this posts informative.
ssurenlk@msn.com
Have a nice day !!
Jun 5, 2008
SAP moving deeper into Asia-Pacific
By S.Suren
In my previous posts I had discussed about how the big boys in the ERP Industry are investing in more resources in India to make sure they make maximum use of the demand of the Asia-Pacific region which is the fastest growing markets for ERP Solutions.
It’s no surprise that companies such as SAP are beginning to invest more in India in the next 2 to 3 months, which would be in the range of USD 4 – 5 Million in new opportunities.
In my previous posts I had mentioned SAP’s Global vision to meet the 15000 SME customer target in the coming years, and this new investment by SAP seems to concentrate on expediting that process since these investments will be targeted at start-up companies in India, via SAP Ventures.
It was stated by a SAP Official that there was a global shortage of 60,000 SAP Consultants, of which 1/3 is in India. The new investments would definitely help in addressing this shortage in the coming years.
For more information on the IT Industry trends read the “2008 IT Skills and Certification Pay Index TM” report published by Foote Partners LLC which is a Vero Beach, Florida based management consultancy and independent market research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice about managing the IT professional workforce.
Visit: http://www.footepartners.com/htscpi_latest.htm
Hope you found this post informative.
Feel free to contact me on ssurenlk@msn.com
In my future posts I shall discuss about the talent crunch faced by ERP Solutions providers and the demographic changes that are having an impact on it, for instance an aging population and declining birth rates in much of the developed world are also beginning to cause a talent crunch in this part of the world.
Have a nice day!!
In my previous posts I had discussed about how the big boys in the ERP Industry are investing in more resources in India to make sure they make maximum use of the demand of the Asia-Pacific region which is the fastest growing markets for ERP Solutions.
It’s no surprise that companies such as SAP are beginning to invest more in India in the next 2 to 3 months, which would be in the range of USD 4 – 5 Million in new opportunities.
In my previous posts I had mentioned SAP’s Global vision to meet the 15000 SME customer target in the coming years, and this new investment by SAP seems to concentrate on expediting that process since these investments will be targeted at start-up companies in India, via SAP Ventures.
It was stated by a SAP Official that there was a global shortage of 60,000 SAP Consultants, of which 1/3 is in India. The new investments would definitely help in addressing this shortage in the coming years.
For more information on the IT Industry trends read the “2008 IT Skills and Certification Pay Index TM” report published by Foote Partners LLC which is a Vero Beach, Florida based management consultancy and independent market research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice about managing the IT professional workforce.
Visit: http://www.footepartners.com/htscpi_latest.htm
Hope you found this post informative.
Feel free to contact me on ssurenlk@msn.com
In my future posts I shall discuss about the talent crunch faced by ERP Solutions providers and the demographic changes that are having an impact on it, for instance an aging population and declining birth rates in much of the developed world are also beginning to cause a talent crunch in this part of the world.
Have a nice day!!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)