Effectively preparing for SAP APO’s end of life

When SAP introduced APO in the ’90s, advanced planning system (APS) implementations were mega-projects with huge budgets and typically required long time-to-operate lead times.

Today, the prevailing wisdom is that companies must connect to the latest and greatest in forecasting and planning to be able to adapt to the changing dynamics in a more and more digitalized environment.

The options of what to do after SAP APO’s end of life are endless, making it difficult to determine the right course of action. Should you transfer to SAP IBP, combined with the required SAP S/4 HANA, to double down on your commitment to your one single vendor? Move to another APS suite covering all planning modules in one heavy solution? Or opt for a ‘new kid on the block’, offering cutting-edge solutions that promise the world, but aren’t yet backed up with track-record.
Either way, companies face a long IT journey and must invest upfront time and energy and commit substantial capital expenditure.

Unplugging SAP APO to your advantage

The good news is, that in just a few weeks you can already get easy access to advanced analytics for your organization – freeing up bandwidth to absorb these insights and further define and build the ideal planning landscape for your specific planning needs.

Here are two great options on how you can achieve this:

• Connect with EyeOn Planning Services as a bridge solution
• Build your fit-for-purpose planning modules in a planning platform environment.

Find more details in our publication or contact us to discuss with our experts which option best suits your business needs!

* SAP APO support has now been extended to 2027

The post SAP APO end of life – what’s next? appeared first on EyeOn.

Turn your challenge into an opportunity for future success. Our experts recommend the following steps to accelerate supply chain digitalization and end-to-end transformation of your supply chain:

Start supply chain digitalization from a solid planning foundation

To realize robust end-to-end transformations it is key to start from a solid supply chain foundation. Start by developing an optimal planning model that translates strategy into operational planning principles. Understand the value drivers in your supply chain and define well connected planning processes and a matching organizational setup to facilitate high value planning decisions. Your process re-design needs to be focused on E2E connections, linking the different layers of planning and control of your supply chain through smart alerts.

Focus on high-quality data and planning parameter automation

A holistic planning model and integrated planning process require robust and well-integrated data structures to drive execution. A well-defined data model and supportive governance processes across your IT landscape are vital to secure setup, maintenance, and right-sizing of your planning parameters. It all starts with having a complete, accurate, and well-aligned master data fundament. Building on this solid baseline you can have the data work for you to build a process for smart-touch automation of your critical planning parameters. As your supply chain develops you can real time update your vital parameters to improve overall planning accuracy.

The full value of advanced planning solutions

A new generation of planning systems promise embedded cognitive automation to make real-time recommendations, predict outcomes, and take timely supply chain decisions. It is crucial that your functional design supports the E2E planning process, connects well to your enterprise-wide data model and allows progressive digital innovations (such as AI and advanced analytics). To realize the full value of your APS (advanced planning and scheduling) system you need to build the right in-house capabilities. Your planners require the right data processing, analytical, and data science skills to operationalize and embed digitalization into the day-to-day planning routine.

Building a digital ecosystem

If you are ready for the next step, look beyond traditional planning systems and investigate how systems of innovation can help to boost planning capabilities in a digital ecosystem. Data science platforms like Dataiku can bring advanced analytics capabilities in-house quickly and can be plugged into the systems that are already in place, like ERPs (enterprise resource planning), APSs, or data lakes. These systems of innovation allow data scientists to make the most out of their expertise, allow for easy collaboration between them and the business, and enable you to go from prototype to production quickly but robustly. Building an ecosystem of digital capabilities will help your organization to accelerate the digital transformation through the implementation of focused innovations.

We are here to support you in your supply chain digitalization journey!

Are you looking for ways to accelerate the digitalization of your E2E supply chain planning process and are you in need of the right expertise and hands-on support to make it happen? We are here to help you in this journey. Together we transform, automate, and optimize. Learn more about E2E transformations or contact us now!

This is the time to build resilient, agile, and sustainable supply chains, maximizing the benefits of digitalization and advanced analytics.

The post Accelerate the digitalization of your supply chain appeared first on EyeOn.

Advanced Planning Solution vendors are fueling this fear by promoting next generation tools as the solution. Next to the traditional Advanced Planning Solution vendors, ‘new kids on the block’ are emerging, making it even more difficult to make a choice. Besides, only few companies already have a clear view on how advanced analytics could give them a competitive advantage.

Bridge the gap to next level planning with advanced planning solutions

The good news is that companies can buy time, while getting access to the latest advanced analytics capabilities. Bridge the gap to next level planning instantly, by plugging-in proven ‘systems of innovation’ into your current APS and/or ERP system. Typical analytics that can be tapped into are advanced forecasting, inventory optimization, or supply chain data engineering (data mining to e.g. determine realistic lead times).

By connecting to this kind of managed services, planning performance gets an instant boost. It enables planners and the organization to get acquainted with next level planning capabilities. And delivers insights to specific future planning needs, to shape their future planning landscape at their own pace.

Learn more about our Planning Services! 

The post Legacy Advanced Planning Solutions (APS) need a boost appeared first on EyeOn.

The underestimated complexity of an ERP/APS implementation process

As consultants with experience in implementing ERP and APS systems across several industries, we find a common situation across corporations: Companies are attracted to the possibilities of great planning improvements that new tools can deliver. E2E connected planning, multi echelon inventory optimization, and supply chain automation to name some examples. While the desired benefits are clear, the path to get there is often not as well-defined. This situation generates a source of frustration as companies struggle through the underestimated complexity of an implementation process.

During the session participants shared their perception on system implementations by ranking their experiences on a scale from 0 to 10. The findings helped to quantify the gap between expectations and reality.

Overwhelmingly, it was clear that implementation projects do not live up to the expectations. The great majority of the projects experienced by the audience were not delivered on time, while none of the projects were delivered on budget. The most concerning fact is that in all the implementations the user adoption only met 5.4 points on a 0 – 10 scale, making clear that poor user adoption will lead to unrealized benefits regardless of the time and money spent on the project.

Implementing ERP or APS has four major phases: Pre-design, design, implementation and go-live. During the session EyeOn offered the possibility to the audience to choose interactively the topics to be discussed in each of the phases. Below we share an overview of the most common topic choices per phase.

Pre-design – Ensuring sufficient planning maturity

Six areas required for successful implementations

Successful implementations require a certain level of maturity in the organisation to be successful. We identified six areas that are required for successful implementations:

• Process
• Roles and responsibilities
• Data and data governance
• Execution
• Tool skills
• Supply chain management ‘basics’

Over the years we have developed detail assessments in these areas to identify gaps that need to be addressed prior to moving into design and implementation phases. We highly advise to validate the supply chain maturity of your company so the implementation project can have a solid and common starting point across the organisation.

Design – Getting the right inputs on the design

Balance between a well-structured, focused, decision-oriented core team and the involvement of extended teams, experts, and business stakeholders is key to gather the right inputs into the design.

While fast progress can be made by sticking to a core team in charge of the project, it is often common that processes or tool functionality gaps are only discovered at the moment of sharing the outcome of the core team with the extended team. We advocate for using the extended teams to validate proposals made by the core team, so timely progress is made. Involving extended teams in an unstructured requirement gathering phase often proves to be a lengthy and ineffective process.

Implementing ERP/APS – Dealing with “we are not ready to move to the next phase”

A pragmatic approach to implementations involves acknowledging it is common that not all items are closed before moving into next phase. This generates uncertainty in the organisation about the level of readiness to move ahead. This situation is familiar when making ‘go’, ‘no-go’ decisions before going live.

The advice to overcome this situation is establishing clearly at the start of the project the key criteria that needs to be fulfilled before moving between phases. This action has two positive consequences:

• It provides focus across the organisation on the requirements that will be assessed before moving forward.
• It creates a clear criteria to check against when evaluating complex decisions to move forward or not.

Go-Live – Leveraging the SME ownership to drive adoption

Based on experience we have identified that trust in a new tool is generated based on experiences over a period of time. As the complexity of planning tools has increased over time, the outcomes generated sometimes resemble a ‘black box’ for many users, leading to distrust and poor user adoption.

Early involvement in the project of a community of future SMEs (subject matter experts) in the system allows to generate trust in the users that will be required to convince others. Early involvement might be time consuming throughout the implementation phase, but this effort will be rewarded by a higher user adoption of the system at the time of go-live.

Learn more about our approach for APS implementations!

EyeOn is a niche consultancy firm that works with clients designing, implementing and executing excellent forecasting and planning processes as a discriminating factor for success. In order to achieve this, we develop and share knowledge with demonstrable return on investment for our clients.

The post Best practices in implementing ERP and APS systems appeared first on EyeOn.

The APS advanced planning systems landscape is changing

We started by giving an overview on the current APS landscape an trends. Bram Bongaerts shared the APS journey of Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, who implemented OMP+ at for their global supply chain. This was followed by an interactive discussion between the participants on their current challenges with regards to their planning systems.

APS 2.0

The event ended with the short pitches of a couple new vendors of advanced planning systems on how they distinguish from traditional systems. A commonality between all of them is that their systems are characterized by the fact that it is open and can be connected to many other tools and data sources. The tool reflects the digital supply chain and the system is built around the planner instead of vice versa.

Key insights from the day

1. The APS advanced planning systems landscape has changed a lot over the last 10 to 15 years. Especially due to increased technological capabilities more and more tools perform better. However, that does not mean that every tool in the ‘leader’ quadrant is fit for purpose as it really depends on the functional scope.
2. The best tool is not always the one that includes all functional areas. It is a cost trade-off to choose one integrated system versus choosing the best fit-for-purpose solution per process (demand planning, supply planning, S&OP).
3. Use the business alongside the design phase of an advance planning system in order to trace back all logical steps taken. Start with cleaning your master data right now before implementing a new process and tool in parallel.
4. Don’t focus only on the planning tool, the planner that uses the tool should be the decisive factor. Different APS tools require a different level of planner expertise.

Presentation

Download the materials that were shared during the day.

We are happy to assist you in selecting, designing, and implementing a fit-for-purpose APS advanced planning system. Contact us now!

The post Capture the value out of APS advanced planning systems appeared first on EyeOn.