Industry:

Retail , Wholesale or Manufacturing

Introduction

Having upto date lead-time information is critical to businesses that hold stock to satisfy customer demand. Too long and you will hold too much stock, too short and you will disappoint customers.

This composite applicaton below is designed to place the updating on lead-times in the hands of the supplier, with the control still being in your organisations hands via Business Rules.

The Process

Suppliers are asked to send a file to on a monthly basis containng lead-times for the products that they supply. Once this file has been received it is processed through a set of business maintained rules to determine if the system can be updated automatically.

These rules include :-

• Is the product valid for the Supplier
• Has the average lead-time changed by x%
• Has a specific product changed by y%

For most of the rules, if a threshold is reached, an an alert  is triggered to the planner of that product so they will recieve a warning of a potential impact on the next planning run. Supply planners can then determine whether they need to communicate with the Supplier to negotiate a more favourable lead-time. When rules are breached by a larger margin,configurable by Supplier, an exception is raised that  postpones the update of the lead-time until it has been approved by the planner of that product.

 Finally any technical exceptions are checked such as a material being locked in the ERP system and these are routed to technical support for resolution.  

At each stage in the process the status of updates can be reported. This information is then used to trend lead-time performance by Supplier. This information is collected in SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse from both SAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver BPM.

Benefits

• Significant reduction in time and effort to process vendor updates (monthly)
• Iimproved lead time enables more accurate customer promises (ATP) and reduces need to keep safety stock

Resources