Mary Lou Retton literally catapulted to international fame at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, becoming the first American woman ever to win the Gold Medal in the All-Around in women's gymnastics. At 4 foot 9 inches tall, she is living proof that the best things come in small packages! In a world of larger than life challenges, like implementing a comprehensive supply chain management vision, sometimes smaller can be better. As with most business transformations, it can’t be accomplished in a single step.
The same is true in achieving the transformative vision toward your supply chain goals, whether they be “becoming more demand driven”, “delivering the perfect order”, “improving forecast accuracy” or other KPI’s. This vision needs to be achieved whilst mastering the supply chain challenges and risks involved when confronting global, virtual, and distributed organizations that comprise your supply chain (See blog: Supply Chain Risk and Charles Darwin) . A roadmap for leveraging continuous progress taming your dynamic supply chain with business management software enabling collaboration, transportation management, and warehouse management integrated with your planning and ERP systems can get you there.
Each step as stated by Neil Armstrong might be “one small step for man…..” well you know the rest! And the supply chain journey is a series of small steps, each of which is supported by a more modular approach to software implementations, known at SAP as Rapid Deployment solutions . This is the 1st of a series of blogs that will introduce to you the benefits of implementing SAP SCM rapid-deployment solutions (RDS) and will demonstrate the leadership SAP has shown in getting companies to realize the benefits and value of improving and perfecting their supply chain and operations managing that chain.
SAP has been delivering integrated end-to-end supply chain processes for years. As supply chain theory and practices have evolved, SAP has been a leader in managing the material movement along the procurement, manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping disciplines and integrating them into planning, operations, finance, and order management. Now, SAP is continuing to innovate in the consumption of these modules, with our new Rapid Deployment Solutions. These solutions combine the SAP software with preconfiguration, a predefined services offering, and powerful implementation accelerators and content that speeds the time to value with implementations usually in less than 12 weeks.
Delighting your customers and their customers - who have the social tools to voice their experiences (Check out blog: Are you ready for the Social Supply Chain?)- requires much more of your organization than ever before including making available (before requested) delivery update and supply chain status. What’s more, offering and then meeting the stated delivery date or projected lead time (and managing any and all dislocations as they arise) profitably is expected. If that weren’t hard enough, responding to unplanned upsides or cancellations and managing risks are more than just “nice to haves” they have become imperatives. Knowing where to start, and managing the projects to build the end to end process capability supporting these high expectations requires experience. SAP has acquired these experiences and have built in best practices both on a capability by capability basis, and SAP SCM rapid-deployment solutions enable the journey as you prioritize and then implement the capabilities meeting your specific needs a quarter (or less) or project at a time as you journey toward supply chain management perfection.
SAP Rapid Deployment solutions enable you to start now, achieve quick wins, and make incremental progress - one prioritized achievement at a time - until your vision is obtained. SAP SCM rapid-deployment solutions ensure short time-to-value implementations for projects suited for fixed price/fixed scope implementations. By combining software, services, preconfiguration, and powerful implementation accelerators these solutions integrate with your technology landscape and provide additional choice of implementing SAP solutions for your supply chain transformation.
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Supply Chain related RDSs’ available today are:
· SAP Extended Warehouse Management rapid-deployment solution
· SAP Supply Network Collaboration rapid-deployment solution for customer collaboration
· SAP BusinessObjects Sales and Operations Planning rapid-deployment solution
· SAP Service Parts Planning rapid-deployment solution
· SAP Supply Chain Management rapid-deployment solution for global available-to-promise (global ATP) c...
· SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence rapid-deployment solution for batch manufacturing
· SAP Transportation Management rapid deployment solution for domestic freight tendering
· SAP Transportation Management rapid deployment solution for domestic transportation planning
With SAP SCM rapid-deployment solutions you can be up and running with the predictability of implementation time, cost, and outcomes meeting expectations. These solutions integrate to your technology landscape with the flexibility to grow as you grow. This really is a case of “the best things come in small packages”
In the next blog post in this series we will dive into the attributes of rapid deployment of Supply Chain, predictability, integration, and choice with details about what is included in the offerings to support you and your organization toward rapid time to value one step at a time. As you think of your supply chain challenges, think also of taking “small steps” on your way to supply chain perfection!
Watch RDS – The Movie
