APO, IBP, Ariba and Supply Chain Management Case studies

The assessment exercise completed a top-down and bottom-up review of end-to-end planning processes for the client, with a particular focus examining how customer order fulfilment performance could be improved. The conclusions and recommendations were based on information collated from over 120 interviews with supply chain, manufacturing and IT staff across 3 regions. The outputs were threefold:

• A top-down assessment of supply chain planning practice maturity in comparison to the level of maturity required to operate the supply chain to meet stated business objectives.
• A bottom-up assessment of the root causes of the customer fulfilment performance and recommended interventions to address root causes.
• A draft roadmap based on 24 defined packages of work.

Olivehorse was tasked with redesigning and integrating the S&OP process for the European, ANZ and African Regions of the company on a single platform to provide end-to-end visibility of the supply chain operations including Supplier management. Our team delivered an IBP S&OP solution to cover the entire S&OP process including new product introduction, demand, supply (unconstrained), and financial reconciliation reviews. Our solution led to improvements in senior management alignment, collaboration between business functions, improved stock allocation, inventory reduction and top line revenue growth.

The client had considerable manual workload for their advanced material regional demand planners to prepare data for forecast generation. Besides the user workload, there was also a high risk of making errors which could have an impact on forecast accuracy and consequently business results throughout the different functions. Olivehorse implemented a series of enhancements to help solve and improve the APO DP solution. Our team identified key opportunities to improve the current solution by means of automation and simplification. These included sales history upload, visibility of open orders in APO DP, material and sold-to hierarchy preparation, automated CVC and realignment program as well as changes to current planning books. The solution resulted in improvement of forecast accuracy driven by data alignment, reduction in the planning cycle driven by automation of master & transaction data and substantial improvements in planner efficiencies.

The client is a global healthcare company with 300 locations globally including vendors and sub-contractors and 38,000 products. Olivehorse helped enable long-term strategic planning for the client with planning horizons of 10 years in future. We achieved this by implementing what-if planning on Demand and Supply scenarios as well as fully integrating IBP system with daily data loads from APO. Our solution resulted in quick and easy supply side analysis in case of BOM/capacity change as well as new product introductions, launch of new plants and alternative sourcing scenarios. The client benefitted from fast execution of planning algorithms e.g. 50,000product locations planned in 3 minutes.

Following the merger of two multinational food businesses, the supply planning function in the European region faced a number of challenges in making the standardised processes and tool set work for both legacy businesses. Olivehorse performed a focused assessment of the planning operation, covering all processes and systems. Olivehorse applied our established planning OH Health Check methodology to benchmark the process, data, system and reporting capabilities against good practice. Areas of weakness were then further assessed to identify the priority actions based on the Olivehorse supply planning enablers. The analysis led to wide ranging recommendations including interventions to address supplier capacity and lead time management, Inventory target setting methods and changes to the levels of data hierarchy.

Reduction in time spent detailed scheduling of between 8 and 12 hours through work package focused improvements to plan quality, reducing number of changes to plan and increasing user confidence.

After a defined scope APO Healthcheck, our team proposed a prioritised detailed scheduling improvement package with the aim of reducing both plan preparation time and the number of changes to plan. The planning process review identified activities and practices that were contributing to established pain points and system workarounds.

With strong expertise in APO PP/DS and ECC PP/PP-PI integration, we worked closely with the in-house competency centre to deliver new functionality, quick win settings and proven custom approaches to achieve business benefit. By addressing core scheduling practices such as sort sequence, complex changeover matrices, labour capacity modelling and make-to-order planning as well as improving user interaction with the graphical planning board, the detailed scheduling solution was better aligned with best practice principles.

We supported a leading paints and coatings company develop and rollout their IBP for sales and operations solution to multiple countries across EMEA.

An early adopter, this company is using SAP IBP to generate plans that combine volume, price and cost and overhead forecasts, to show the impact on revenue and EBIT. Olivehorse has helped all aspects of design, configuration and testing of the IBP and associated JAM collaboration solutions. The solution is currently being rolled out to business units around the world.

As the result of a merger of two multinational food businesses the European region’s planning function faced a number of challenges to make standardised processes and tool sets work for both legacy businesses.

Olivehorse performed a short, focused assessment of the planning operation, covering all processes and systems. We applied our established planning healthcheck methodology to benchmark the process, data, system and reporting capabilities against good practice.  We further assessed identified areas of weakness to determine priority actions and how these could be accelerated using our established tools and enablers.

The customer recognised the value our recommendations and is currently working with us, and its SAP Systems Integration Partner, to implement the suggested adjustments and realign its business processes and data.

This greenfield project for a global beverages business with more than 120,000 location products and over 30 factories worldwide saw Olivehorse team members, responsible for the overall APO solution design and build.

We implemented DP, SNP and Deployment Optimisation, Customer and Supplier Collaboration as well as Business Warehouse capabilities. Olivehorse then led the deployment to the largest global market and enhanced the solution deploying SAP Enterprise Inventory and  Service to drive improved inventory performance.

This client saw an increase of ‘on-time schedule adherence’ from 20% to 99% for its semi-finished goods mixing process, following our development of a new APO Production Scheduling solution.

The solution modelled complex resource network relationships and optimised an integrated scheduling solution for the mix and package orders, improving order alignment and control. The improved schedule adherence resulted in improved asset utilisation and control of raw materials inventory.

This SFG scheduling solution has now evolved to include optimisation of storage tank capacity constraints and bulk material purchase order scheduling directly in APO-PPDS.

This large scale facility contained more than 30 production lines, producing over 600 finished goods products, distributed to 10 distribution centres.

As a result of the scale and complexity increased time was spent engaging the management and staff, and ensuring both the DDMRP methodology and the Replenishment+ software was well understood and embraced.  This investment led to a recent successful go-live.

This client implemented DDMRP at a key site in the supply chain to reduce extended frozen planning periods, and gain control over poor service performance.

This was achieved by firstly buffering the raw and packaging materials, ensuring 100% availability, allowing the site to move from 56 days to nine days’ frozen period for production planning with zero impact of site efficiency or capacity. The distribution network was also buffered using DDMRP, this led to a 30% reduction in total inventory (across raw, pack and finished goods) and an increase in customer service from low to mid 80s to mid 90s.