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SAP SCM Product Suite
February 23, 2018

SAP SCM Product Suite

Alok Jaiswal | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SAP Supply Chain Management

SAP SCM product suite especially APO (Advanced Planning and Optimization) is used for carrying out planning and scheduling in the manufacturing business. Demand Planning helps in creating a statistical forecast for different product lines based on past history, promotional events, consumer trends and competitive intelligence.

Production planning utilizes limited resources to satisfy customer demand and production activities over a specified time horizon. In supply chain, Planning and scheduling problems are inherently optimization problems where objective is to develop a plan that meets demand at minimum cost or that fills the demand while maximizing profit
  • Availability of different statistical forecasting methods covering different patterns i.e. Trend, Cyclical, Seasonal and Irregularity.
  • Different modules to cater to different business requirement ranging from long-term need (Demand Planning), Medium Term (Supply Planning), Short Term (Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling).
  • Easy integration with core ERP for transfer of master and transaction data. Planning specific functions can be executed in SAP APO while execution can still be carried out in core ERP suite.
  • Demand Planning may or may not be liked by business users. Configuration and UI interface can be difficult to get used to.
  • May require extensive configuration if the standard functionalities do not meet all business requirements
  • Debugging issues with SAP Live cache for any trouble shooting require deep technical ABAP knowledge
  • It helped optimize the shipment plan and transportation costs by building shipment plans to deliver the right products to the customer on time in a cost-effective method
  • Automate carrier selection process based on cost and carrier commitment
  • Enables the sharing of anticipated demand and replenishment needs between the customer and business to smooth out the ripple effects of down stream uncertainty
  • As400
SAP provides an extensive product suite with its SCM and has functionalities to cater to different industries. Supply chain planning is divided into several steps, some of which are executed by components in SAP ECC and others by components in SAP SCM. It is possible and advisable to integrate these two systems and to use them together for planning. System integration takes place using the Core Interface (CIF). Even though As/400 remains a critical part of the computing infrastructure for many of the global organizations, ease of scalability, integration with cloud, advanced planning and analytics functionality and availability of strong talents make SAP SCM a better choice.
It is a great product suite where you can use many of the out of the box functionalities with minimal customization. For example managing multiple product configurations using variant configuration, using the Integrated Product and Process Engineering function for the automobile industry is great to use and is applicable to many organizations. For paper and metal industry though, it may require extensive customization including the creation of custom heuristics for scheduling, integration with third-party enterprise applications.