My Name is Iosif Sass, I am a Senior Consultant and team - lead of the APO team within SAPs Near-shore Centre (NSC) in Romania. My experience with SAP goes over a period of 7+ years, a time-frame in which I have helped several large customers worldwide, bringing their supply chain up to speed with integrated solutions from SAP.
However, recently I have had the pleasure to work with SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions (RDS), as part of a strategic initiative to position the NSC as a regional delivery hub for such rapid-deployment implementations, a story which I would like to share with you.
Customer Challenge
An automotive small midsized business needed a solution outside of their already existing SAP ECC, to help optimize their production sequence and thus help make a better use of their current capacities. At this point we’ve proposed them the SAP Advanced Production Scheduling rapid-deployment solution; An RDS based on SAPs Advanced Planning & Optimization (APO) most sought-after module, Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling, in short PP/DS.
This out-of-the-box solution allows the customer to use APO for external scheduling of their production sequence by means of APO. Basically, they keep their current process as-is but we add an additional step for optimizing order sequences through the advanced heuristics (planning logic which takes constraints such as capacity into account) and then feed this optimized data back to their ERP for execution. In short this process looks as follows:
The RDS APS solution proved that this out-of-the-box solution was nearly a perfect match to the customer’s requirements and we moved to the implementation phase.
Implementing the RDS
With each RDS the implementation methodology/approach is a bit different when compared to your regular ASAP. With RDS’es we only have some scoping
workshops and then we move to the actual deployment.
When implementing one has two variants, either choose an automated implementation by means of the Solution Builder (system prerequisites need be met) or go for a manual customization. For this particular deployment we went for the first option, meaning we did an automated implementation of the basic settings for the scenarios and then moved to fine-tune the solution to customer specifics. We managed to have a first draft of the solution in about 3 weeks
from the beginning of the implementation. At this point the customer could already test the scenarios and provide valuable input.
Following some fit-gap discussions we had to also implement some minor changes, these where however foreseen as deltas in the work breakdown structure. The whole solution was then ready for move into production after seven and half weeks.
We closed the project after 9 weeks in due time and in budget.
The customer was happy with the solution and is already making inquiries regarding further extensions of the APO suite, such as Demand Planning and other.
In Conclusion
SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions are a fast-track approach to implementing proven SAP-solutions for a targeted group of customers, or help speed-up regular implementations by means of the accelerators as part of an engineered-to-order approach.
Nevertheless, rapid-deployment solutions significantly reduce the time needed from kick-off to production for any SAP implementation; it is however mandatory that the scoping is done very thoroughly and the customer understands perfectly what they are getting for the money. Case in which the RDS proved to be a simple, fast, cost efficient and qualitative approach to any SAP implementation.
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