The Lack of Advice Setting Up Global SAP System - Brightwork Research & Analysis

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Executive Summary

The Emphasis of the Various Supply Planning Threads During the Setup
Setting Up a Global SAP Planning System from the Beginning
The Forethought Required for Setting up a Global SAP SNP Instance

Introduction

In this article, we will be describing the effort required for setting up the jobs for a global SAP SNP APO instance and, therefore, different supply planning threads in the system. But to begin, let us layout the different supply planning threads.

The following are the general frequency of the different supply planning processes.

S&OP & Rough Cut Capacity Plan: These are used for long-range planning and, in most cases, are off-line analyses and are not part of the live environment.
The Initial Supply Plan: (performed by MRP in ERP systems) Produces initial production and procurement plan. It is focused on bringing stock into the supply network and creating stock with planned production orders. It can also be called the master production schedule (MPS) if the initial supply plan is run under certain criteria. To see more on this topic, see this link.
The Deployment Plan: (performed by DRP in ERP systems). Focused on pushing stock from locations at the beginning of the supply network to the supply network’s end.
The Redeployment Plan: (performed by specialized applications with redeployment functionality or with a custom report). Focused on repositioning stock, which is already in the supply network, to locations with a higher probability of consumption. To read more on this thread, see this link.

The Emphasis of the Various Supply Planning Threads During the Setup

In general, the initial supply plan is the most complex, and the most effort goes into developing methods for it. It also receives the most focus of any supply planning process. While each of the major supply planning processes can be considered independent from one another, they share much of the same master data on the supply network. One area of master data is of particular importance.

In SNP, the complicating factor in the use of a multi-method approach is the transportation lanes. In SNP transportation lanes control the connection between internal locations (DCs, RDCs, etc..) and can be set up to control the connections between internal and external locations (this is performed when a company running APO wants to model the vendor locations. This is described in this article)

Setting Up a Global Planning System from the Beginning

Some companies that plan to roll out APO in multiple regions from the beginning develop a global SAP batch schedule, which makes several assumptions about hardware sizing, and global SAP run times. This is extremely challenging to do in the beginning. There are so many factors.

First, I have never seen an APO-go live that went live and did not require substantial tuning after the fact. Therefore, if this global SAP batch schedule is based upon an early stage go-live, it will simply be wrong when that company has gone through the cycles of learning with their first implementation. And that is if – and a big “if” the company has placed all product locations into APO from their first implementation. Often this is not the case. Companies implement some product locations in SAP APO, while other product locations are managed in a separate system and then migrated over to APO.

There is a continual bias, particularly on IT and the technical resources who configured the system to want to declare victory and move onto the next challenge. At the same time, the business has to pull the technical resources back to reality continually. The realization that the first several iterations did not meet business requirements, and the system must be changed in several areas to make it work properly. I have seen this time and time again. I can recall being brought into one client – as usual by IT. I was essentially forbidden from publishing research that did anything but say that the system was working 100% as desired and meeting all business requirements. I was threatened with being replaced by IT if I did not change my “analytical approach” and eventually was removed from the project several months later. In fact, I did moderate my approach somewhat, but what IT wanted was a cheerleader that would talk up what was a poor implementation of a system that produced low-quality output for the planners.

The Forethought Required for Setting up a Global SAP SNP Instance

Considerable effort and forethought are required to set up a global SAP instance correctly. Very few individuals are qualified to make these guesses about what all global SAP processing times will be. Even highly experienced resources that have decades of experience in this area have difficulty forecasting global SAP batch job times because of the variations between companies and methods employed that any resources draw upon to make their predictions.

A global SAP instance of SNP makes the overall setup much more difficult because multiple time zones cut into the processing time available for SNP. SNP requires much more integration and through in its setup to support a global SAP supply network than, say, DP or PP/DS. SNP has “loops” or data flows between locations in a way that other supply planning applications do not.

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Conclusion

One would expect SAP to provide a great deal of support for setting up global SAP SNP instances, but in fact, the reverse is true. While there are many SNP implementations globally, companies can expect very little advice from SAP to set up global SAP implementations. While SAP has a rich database of clients that could easily go back and what and mine for what worked didn’t, SAP never seems to do this outside of supporting sales initiatives. The information that is in this article is all from my client’s experiences. All that I expect from SAP is their hardware sizer, which can be used to determine the size of the servers required for different supply networks, and different methods.

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