Next to the launch of version 1610 of SAP S/4 HANA the year ends with some other SAP product launches of interest for chemical companies. Continuing with the execution of our supply chain strategy, the most important product launch to be mentioned here is the release of the 1611 version of SAP Integrated Business Planning, which includes the applications SAP® Integrated Business Planning for sales and operations, SAP® Integrated Business Planning for inventory, SAP® Integrated Business Planning for demand, SAP® Integrated Business Planning for response and supply, and SAP® Supply Chain Control Tower.
This newest release has new features in all areas of IBP. New capabilities across each application include:
Demand
- Improved capabilities for both volume (ABC) and variability (XYZ) segmentation
- Updated forecast error calculations including better handling of outliers and null values and added calculations for total error and total absolute error
Response and supply
- Supply: Optimizer- Telescoping planning, tiered safety stock and non-delivery costs, addition of production lead times, and improved input \ output logs
- Single planning area for order based response planning and time series based S&OP planning to run on the same operational master data. New enhanced integration for Master data provisioned by a new advanced Smart Data Integration (SDI).
Sales and operations
- Fair-share distribution allows the S&OP optimizer to distribute available material fairly, for example, when the quantity requested by different customers or locations cannot be fulfilled completely
- Modeling of minimum aggregated constraints for customer transports, transports, and production as pseudo-hard constraints
- New output key figures for amount of customer demand that has been delivered late in a particular period and number of periods with late customer demand
- Additional improvements to process management automation
Inventory
- Root-cause analysis using safety stock drivers
- Improve logging for inventory optimization operators
- Support for constraining internal service level to upper/lower Bounds at product/location level for non-stockout probability and fill rate.
Supply Chain Control Tower
- Possible to create charts that show data from previous time periods together with data from the current time period
- Navigation from custom alerts to Excel
- Single alerts (aggregated) for conditions that are triggered in multiple time periods
- New Manage Cases app for task and case management and enablement of change history for cases
Focused Business Solutions: New Versions of SAP Innovation Management and Yard Logistics
SAP Innovation Management 2.1 is a stand-alone solution to collect and validate ideas. It helps managing idea campaigns from the first idea to validated concepts, optionally integrated with SAP Portfolio and Project Management or SAP Jam.
Key Innovations of SAP Innovation Management 2.1
- Custom Idea Forms – Capture additional, campaign-specific structured information from idea submitters
- Responsibility Lists - Define hierarchical responsibility lists and use them to quickly route ideas to experts and coaches
- Rewards - Reward employees for their ideas
- Following - Follow campaigns, ideas and tags and never miss any update
- Campaign Blogs – Create and manage blogs for campaigns to drive up and keep user engagement
Business Value:
- Powerful solution to find more needles in the haystack, faster
- Bridge innovation silos across functions, business units and geographies
- Accelerated ideation process, speed-up idea to concept phase
- Foster interdisciplinary team building
- Increase employee engagement to participate in ideation process
Product Highlights:
- Enterprise-grade ideation platform, integrated into product development
- Collaborative creativity space to elaborate on ideas
- Easy to use and available on all mobile devices
- Ability to identify similar ideas and experts across organizational silos powered by SAP HANA
SAP Yard Logistics 2.0 provides many new features and functions which significantly increase the supported processes and functionalities, e.g. enabling
self-services and
IoT scenarios.
Main topics are
- Self-Check-In functionality to simplify the arrival process while decreasing the check-in duration
- With IoT features the solution supports the digitalization of the yard
- Integration to Dock Appointment Scheduling in order to plan incoming and outgoing transports
- EH&S integration for the usage of hazardous substances and dangerous goods.
- External driver communication provides a communication channel with entities without system user
- Based on the Classification of Transportation Units the handling of customer requirements is significantly improved
Typical benefits for the customers are:
- Reduction of processing time in the yard
- Cost savings by better space and workforce utilization
- TCO reduction by integrated system landscape
- Avoidance of critical situations due to real time tracking
New Financial solutions
Following the Q2 release of SAP Real Spend, and the Q3 release of SAP S/4HANA Finance Cloud for customer payments and SAP S/4HANA Finance Cloud for credit integration, the next SAP HANA Cloud Platform application
SAP Financial Statement Insights was released.
SAP Financial Statement Insights enables finance professionals to discover hidden trends and leverage unused potential from financial information by performing personalized ad-hoc analysis of financial statements in real-time. It allows finance professionals to conduct real-time financial reporting, display and simulate organizational changes on the fly, answer upper management inquiries immediately, and identify enterprise areas for strategic focus and business improvement.
SAP Lease Administration by Nakisa v3.1 helps companies to enable their equipment lessee administration processes. Available on-premise or in the SAP HANA Cloud Platform,
SAP Lease Administration by Nakisa v3.1 combines lease abstraction and lease accounting capabilities to allow companies to capture lease data and immediately understand the impact of the accounting valuations for FAS 13, IAS 17, ASC 842, and IFRS 16.
SAP Lease Administration is complementary to SAP Finance solutions and provides Lease Abstracting / Data Collection, Visualization, and Accounting Valuations which enables companies to collect equipment lease contract information from various sources and consolidate this information into a single SAP system. The solution supports to classify contracts under either ASC 840 or IAS 17 only (leading standard) and to evaluate contracts under ASC 842 and IFRS 16 (questionnaire). The solution also provides valuation and analysis of the equipment lease information to enable corporate compliance with global accounting standards and improved decision making for their equipment lease portfolios.
Ariba Innovations
SAP Ariba launched
7 innovations, including:
- Guided Buying
- Supplier Management
- Supplier Risk
- Direct Materials Sourcing
- Supply Chain Finance
- Extension Studio
- Cloud Integration Gateway
