SAP certified solution EWM Advanced Cycle Counting 1.0 reduces the risks of implementation

Company Name: Bizadept Consulting GmbH
Industry: Consulting
Products and Services: SAP EWM focused products and implementation services
SAP Solutions: SAP EWM

It has been a great experience working with SAP ICC colleagues. We worked  with SAP ICC for both our product certifications and information was provided upfront to reduce the delays. SAP ICC colleagues also responded quickly whenever we faced problems during the packaging of the product. These experiences have given us more confidence to consider the possibility of going down the co-innovation path with SAP for design and development of complex products in the coming years. Samiullah Sheik, Founder & Managing Director, Bizadept Consulting GmbH.

It was a pleasure to interact with Samiullah Sheik, founder and MD at Bizadept Consulting GmbH and a highly successful SAP consultant with full stack of technology, process and industry specific knowledge across multiple verticals. He graduated as ifs/ Henry Grunfeld Scholar from INSEAD, France with an MBA in 2013. Based in UK and Germany, Bizadept is a boutique European business consulting firm that drives digital transformation of supply chain and procurement organizations The company’s second solution EWM Advanced Cycle Counting 1.0 was recently certified by SAP Integration and Certification Center (SAP ICC), part of Partner Innovation Lifecycle Services group and has also been  listed in SAP Store. Thank you Samiullah Sheik, for sharing your experience working with our team throughout the development and certification stages.

1) Thank you very much for accepting our request to discuss about your journey and experience with SAP ICC, can you tell us about your company Bizadept Consulting GmbH and its key services?

Bizadept Consulting GmbH was formed in 2018 in Germany. The mission for our start-up was to meet the demand of highly specialised SAP Extended Warehouse Management consulting services from the ever-increasing SAP SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM) customer base across EU.  We offer two key services to our customers.

The first service is to help our clients that are working on complex EWM implementations by deploying the expertise of our technically and functionally adept SAP EWM consultants — that is where the adept in Bizadept comes from. Our consultants are globally oriented with deep EWM expertise acquired while working in complex global projects across multiple verticals.

The second service is to de-risk the complex EWM implementations by providing SAP certified products that are built on top of SAP EWM. This is a critical aspect of our value proposition as we turn our learnings from complex EWM implementations into tangible offerings through SAP certified EWM Add-Ons. These Add-ons help in reducing the costs and risks of a complex EWM implementation, enabling the customers in turn to focus on streamlining their business processes.

Our first Add-on APIS 1.0 helps clients streamline their production lines by providing RFUI based consumption and receipt of serialised products in EWM without any additional middleware. With the release of APIS 1.0 in late 2019, we also became an SAP Silver partner that has enabled us to form closer relationships with SAP.

2) When and how did Bizadept Consulting GmbH begin their journey with SAP?

Our first interactions with SAP started in late 2018 to pitch a customer driven use case for an EWM Add-On. We were keen to understand if SAP EWM product team had any plans to address our use case. Though SAP EWM product team does not validate external use cases, it helped us  to kick start our product development roadmap. As a result, Bizadept Consulting GmbH started its journey with SAP in 2019 to help customers streamline their production lines through an EWM Add-On, APIS 1.0.

3) Kindly provide few points about the challenges that you faced before approaching SAP Integration and Certification Center (SAP ICC)?

At the outset, we knew we had to work with SAP ICC to get our products SAP certified. It was baked into our strategy of building robust products that our clients could trust. SAP ICC certification was the only way we could provide clients the assurance that our products are developed with highest standards of quality.

4) Can you tell us a little bit more about your certified EWM Advanced Cycle Counting 1.0 and its integration with SAP NetWeaver?

Our second product, EWM Advanced Cycle Counting (ACC) 1.0, addresses the long-held need for a native EWM cycle counting solution that does counting at HU level instead of bin level. This solution approach enables the warehouse operations to continue without disruption while HUs are brought out to counting Work Centers.

ACC automates the cycle counting of majority of HUs based on the pre-defined business rules that can be set up for each warehouse. Automation of cycle counting helps in significant reduction of FTEs (Full Time Equivalents) that perform cycle counting. The efficiencies become increasingly significant for the automated warehouses as there is no need to stop the warehouse operations to execute the automated cycle count.

Our solution leverages the standard bin-based cycle counting solution in SAP Extended Warehouse Management 9.5 that is built on top of SAP NetWeaver. We intend to eventually port our product to SAP S/4HANA once our clients upgrade from EWM 9.5 to SAP S/4HANA in the coming years.

5) How did you leverage our SAP Remote and Connectivity (SAP RAC) service?

SAP RAC has turbo charged our product development plans as it removed all the uncertainty and delays around finding a hosting provider, installing the SAP software, managing the SAP landscape etc. Individuals from SAP RAC team went beyond their official capacities to support us on the weekends to bring the system back up when the systems went down.

6) How did the certification help in improving the quality of the product and positioning it to customers?

SAP ICC guidelines on the pre-requisites for SAP certified products helped us fine-tune our development standards and solution architecture to make sure our Add-on can seamlessly work with various types of SAP EWM installations.

I believe, for start-ups like us, SAP certification amplifies the reach of the product in the SAP Add-Ons market. Also, customers trust the SAP certification for the Add-on as it provides quality assurance that the Add-on can be installed and un-installed without causing issues in the existing SAP landscape.

7) What next for your certified solution EWM Advanced Cycle Counting 1.0?

Our challenge is now to market it to the global EWM customer base, especially in the Life Sciences industry. Since EWM Advanced Cycle Counting 1.0 is now on SAP Store, we are keen to extend our working relationship with SAP Store Digital Commerce teams from North America, EMEA and APJ to increase the visibility of the product.