How to Understand iPPE and GATP - Brightwork Research & Analysis

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Executive Summary

What is integrated product and production engineering?
How does integrated product and production engineering work?
What is the production model?
Interesting uses of integrated product and production engineering.
Strengths of iPPE.
The requirements to use iPPEs.
Common client questions on iPPEs.

What is an Integrated Product and Production Engineering?

“This component enables you to collect all the data for an entire product life cycle in one integrated model. It is particularly suited to products with many variants. You can use iPPE to document data, and later re-use and update it, from early phases of the research and development process for a product.” – SAP Help

“You can represent a complete production model because Integrated Product and Process Engineering allows you to keep the master data for BOMs, routings, and line design in one model. It is particularly suited to repetitive manufacturing.” – SAP Help

Our References for This Article

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Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem.
Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers.

How Does iPPE Work?

This component enables you to collect all the data for an entire product life cycle in one integrated model. It is particularly suited to products with many variants. In fact, iPPE is very strongly connected to variant configuration.

Production Model

You can represent a complete production model because Integrated Product and Process Engineering allow you to keep the master data for BOMs, routings, and line design in one model. It is particularly suited to repetitive manufacturing.

Interesting Uses of Integrated Product and Process Engineering

iPPE actually connects to GATP when GATP is configured to perform Availability Checking with BOM or Kits. While iPPE defines what is in the kits, GATP then checks with iPPE to perform this availability checking. The process for this interaction looks like this.

ATP is triggered by the sales order system
One of the substitutions is determined to be a kit
Availability check is performed on a kit planned stock
If no stock is found, iPPE is triggered to initiate production of this kit
Confirmation goes back to CRM or SAP SD

To find out more about GATP, see this article.

Strengths

The use of iPPE is particularly recommended for products with many variants that are configured-to-order.

PreReqs

1. Engineering Change Management (ECM)
2. Classification System
3. Variant Configuration

Common Client Questions Regarding the iPPE

When pitching the iPPE, it’s important to explain in significant detail the differences between the iPPE, the PPM, and the PDS. In fact, a presentation on just this subject is critical so that the client can understand the applicability and level of effort involved in each of these structures. While up to the presentation point, the only exposure the decision makers in the organization may have had is to sales presentations that laud the applicability of the PDS and iPPE to the client’s business. However, there is a lot more than just the question of functionality with these structures.

There is also the question of maintenance and implementation effort. Because of the focus of executives, the tendency is to emphasize certain aspects of software over others. Primarily this is the ROI of the implementation and the software’s functionality.

decision

However, a full presentation on all the aspects of the PDS, iPPE, and PPM can help the company make a more informed decision than that provided by the software sales team.