Product Lifecycle Costing – A true Co-Innovation Story continuous

JOINT Forces to accelerate business innovation

On Oct. 8-9. SAP and interested customers conducted the 10th Co-Innovation council for
SAP Product Lifecycle Costing –  a solution to calculate costs and other dimensions for new products or quotations in an early stage of the product lifecycle, to quickly identify cost drivers along the lifecycle, and to easily simulate and compare alternatives.

The product GA now since three years was and is still developed in a true Co-Innovation exchange with customers. Among those Automotive Suppliers, Automotive OEMs and Industrial Machinery companies as well as CP Products customers and representatives from the High Tech and the Oil & Gas Industry.

Co-innovation with SAP is mutual knowledge flow through joint invention, many forums exist for you to get involved at all levels.

In this 10th council SAP left a lot impressed customers behind – in total SAP hosted 80 attendees from customers representing the industries mentioned above.

While running this true co-innovation journey with customers now in the third year, customers have still been impressed what the product is capable to do.

At this event all participants have been truly stunned by a customer presentation when a global engineer to order company outline how they are using our system today to calculate their whole Engineer to order products. They see themselves in the EPC business which is not any easy business in terms of business processes. Together with the help of SAP services team and some really engaged consultants this is one of the first live customers in the OIL & GAS industry.

Participants could see in realtime the explosion of a multilevel BOM with routings – in total over 5000 items and how the calculation was done within a second.  Also impressing was the integration with DMS, Visual Enterprise and SAP ERP. This was also the first time using configurable BOMs and the product structure (PSM) as the input structure for their first cost estimate.

Customer also liked it very much and the most benefit for that was that they could learn from each other. This time highlights have been

• The customer presentation
• The live testing which could have been extended.
• The concept on how to handle inter-company and transfer prices and the one time cost distribution over product lifetime for new products
• The analysis path framework
• And the IBP (integrated business planning) – integration PoC

Having said that, one of the most thrilling things was that with having these new concepts in place in one of our next releases – new customers seemed convinced that PLC can solve their issues in their todays business as well.

In addition SAP showed also what can be done with integrating into the SAPs product world. Showing to customers two show case  – PLC and Integrated Business Planning for midterm supply planning incl. new products and PLC and APF (analysis path framework).

The future vision for the product is now to bring PLC to be the product of choice not only for calculating future cost but calculating future profits and margins and to continue the integration story.

In the end I wanted to highlight the value of co-innovation.  SAP is well versed collaborating with customers (SAPPHIRE, SAP User Groups, TechEd, Customer Influence programs), historically product roadmaps are influenced by SAP’s strategic vision, industry, evolving global markets and revolutionary technologies (to name but a few).  Listening and learning from customers resonates the most and this can be seen our roadmaps.