SAP S4/HANA for Intelligent Enterprise and Digital Supply Chain

SAP S4/HANA is a cloud solution that promotes enterprise resource planning in an intelligence-driven manner. An innovative enterprise is the one that drives customer experience management by employing a business technology platform strengthened further with a suite of applications. 

S4/HANA from SAP, with its in-memory database structure, allows companies to have the required intelligence in various operations, including the supply chain. 

The digitized supply chain needs to collect information of various kinds on a real-time basis. Order demand, fleet availability, warehouse availability, market conditions’ analysis, and other aspects are brought on to a collaborative model and make the process smooth and error-free. 

SAP S4/HANA is available in different modules; some of these modules are explicitly designed to achieve intelligent enterprise fueled by the digitally advanced supply chain. These modules are:

Advanced Available-to-Promise

Advancement of available-to-promise brings in intelligence in this basic function. This module helps to design the enterprise resources to match customer demand. There is a constant trade-off between the front-and back-end happening that this module directs as well as supervises. 

This supervision is available in device-centric style as the information is available for access in all types of gadgets. With this module, one can:

• Enable configuration, allotment, and monitoring of product allocation
• Seamless requirement fulfillment by replacing the original plant with alternative one on demand
• Prioritize and re-prioritize demands as per resource availability and delivery demands

Extended Warehouse Management

A warehouse is the core strength of any robust supply chain. Several attempts to sophisticate warehouse management have met successful solution in S4/HANA WMS module that enables:

• Easy management of high-volume warehouse
• Integration of complex supply chain logistics with distribution and warehousing system
• Optimization of inventory tracking and other functions like multi channel fulfillment, cross-docking, etc. in real-time

Better coordination, enhanced scalability and flexibility, compliance and transparency, and improved services along with cost-effectiveness are some of the values that S4/HANA delivers and brings intelligence in the digital supply chain model consequently. 

Materials Requirement Planning

Materials Requirement Planning brings intelligence and seamlessness in working on the digitally designed supply chain by performing functions, such as:

• Prioritized view of material flow issues to enable timely actions
• System-generated proposals for validated solutions
• Tailor-made capacity design to adjust to varying quantities
• Real-time inventory management to ensure automatic ordering and reordering
• Warehouse exceptional issues management with a focus on seamless execution of orders
• Alternative resource management to keep the chain in motion
• Seamless sourcing and smart contract execution

Inventory management

Inventory management can grow in intelligence when the sophistication of S4/HANA demonstrates its impact on various parts of this process. With the help of the S4/HANA implementation model, the businesses meet the requirements of inventory management driven by better seamlessness in the overall process and better coordination among various trigger points like resource pool, market demand, warehouse demands, goods-in-motion and so on. 

Some of the common advancements achieved by the S4/HANA in inventory management are:

• Integration between SAP and e-commerce platforms to make online businesses more responsive to situations
• Batch updates for faster and more streamlined inventory data management
• Bird’s view of the storage and manufacturing plant data to make quicker decisions
• Change in inventory management design according to business cycle stage and demand analysis results

With provision for integrating Big Data, IoT, Blockchain kind of futuristic technologies, SAP modules are promising extended relevance for the coming times. Thus, the best time to migrate to S4/HANA is now.

Here is how to carry out the migration

Migration to SAP’s S4/HANA involves four following phases:

• Assessment: The experts need to assess the requirement and challenges to tackle as well. Setting up a timeline can enable adopting a disciplined approach. Taking into account all problems with on-premises systems and make a list of loopholes to plug.
• Parallel Optimization: Transferring the system to the S4/HANA cloud and copying functionalities there to compare and coordinate processes
• Transformation: Adopting S4/HANA through deployments enabling introduction and implementation of new features in the process

When SAP’s S4/HANA is employed, the users also get analytics support and virtual bot support empowered with AI, known as CoPilot. 

To conclude, moving to S4/HANA is a step taken well in the direction of better performance and intelligent working of the supply chain. If digitization is the requirement, S4/HANA from SAP is the perfect answer.