After a bit of a lay off due to work pressures I can continue with this series.
The next 6 things are numbers 31-36 and again they are not necessarily in any order of importance. This is part of a series of postings and at the moment will end at 39 unless I think of some more or I get some feedback for things that I have missed so as always please let me know your thoughts.

31. Review alternative methods of working (or else somebody else will)
Outsourcing, co-sourcing and other methods of working are out there, always in the press and the board will read the articles and ask if one of them could save them money. It can be effective for a number of reasons and in some cases not at all suitable. This can change year on year as different business change comes into play. The key thing here is not to ignore it but to review and be in a position to recommend a change or to show why it is not suitable at this stage. I would look at this on a regular basis.

32. Know your support capabilities
It is extremely important to know what your support capabilities are and failure in this area will catch you out at the worst possible time. Make sure you know what you need to support in terms of system and Infrastructure, to what level and over what periods. Then assess your existing capabilities and identify the gaps. Fill the gaps as soon as possible whether that’s internally or using a third party to extend your own capabilities. You will sleep better.

33. Manage the minefield of software licensing
Don’t get into trouble over illegal licences. It is theft after all. Ensure you know what software you are using. Consider a software discover solution. Lock down PC’s so people can’t install software without approval. Have a policy that the staff are signed up to so it is a disciplinary offence to install software without authority. Record your licences/ invoices so you can prove ownership. Get somebody trained to understand licensing as some suppliers make it complicated and you can find yourself in an illegal situation without realising it.

34. Recruitment plan with structured interviews
When recruiting create a plan. The plan should contains such things as Creating the Job specification and personal specification, Defining the recruitment process (how and who), Considering filter or pre screening of candidates, the interview process (stages/ interviewers/ structured questions etc), Testing (consider technical tests and/or psychometric testing), Background and reference checking, Offer process. This should then lead into an induction programme for the new recruit.

35. Retain your staff
It’s a bit like customers. It’s cheaper to keep your existing staff than recruit new ones. You don’t just have to pay them massive amounts of cash but you do need to treat them well. Some key things to consider are frequent communication (people like to know what is going on), Regular Appraisal (Listen and give feedback on performance), Training (give people the skills and keep them up-to-date), Working environment (make it a great place to work), Fun (bring some fun into work with sports and social type activities), Rewards and Recognition (not necessarily expensive but recognising achievement or going that extra mile is worth a lot to the individual)

36. Audit
Auditing gives the opportunity to check that things are being done as expected. Consider an external audit but if not you could do it internally. Obviously not as good as it is hard to be objective when you are amongst it. Create an Audit plan starting with the scope and objectives. Who is going to do it, what are they going to look at and how. Something’s to consider auditing are the DR plan and tests, Backups, Change control process, Any of your documented processes, SLA compliance and process etc.

In IS AFS 5.0, the specific functionalities that have been included in the SAP R/3 are:

In AFS Master Data:

Material Grids (refer to the earlier post on “Using 3D Options in SAP AFS”, by Azwath for more information on this enhancement)

Categories - AFS materials are based on a large volume of data. To order this data volume, AFS uses categories. Categories are used to logically segment materials. You can enter a specific schedule line for a material per grid value. You can distinguish a material by color and size, for example. Using categories you can also order the grid values at different quality levels, customer segments, and countries of origin

Seasons - In the fashion industry, seasons are an integral part of the business processes. Previously, seasons were only available in Sales and Distribution (SD). In SAP AFS, you can have a season at the stock side. It has been enhanced so that it can also be used for Material Management (MM), Production Planning (PP), and Inventory Management (IM).

In Sales & Distribution

Value Added Services – Some of your customers might request that you add customer-specific services to the goods they ordered before they are delivered. Customers frequently request special labels, packing according to certain criteria, or other special services for their goods.

Depending on what kind of service and how complicated it is, you will need materials, know-how and/or more personnel to provide the service. An added service that you provide upon customer demand is therefore not free of charge, but rather it increases the value of the goods that you will deliver. You can calculate price markups that your customer has to pay, to reimburse you for your resources and materials.

You can map these requirements including their costs as value-added services in the AFS system.

Multi-store orders – The multi-store order (MSO) facilitates the mapping of business processes in which a corporation requires goods from you for any number of stores You can process all stores in one single order.

You explode the MSO document in the following process steps. The system creates individual sales documents.

This allows you to make specific and clear changes to the order quantity for certain stores.

Available to Promise (ATP) – The AFS availability check is carried out in the order entry to see whether the desired AFS material is available for the requested delivery date in, for example, the selected color or size. During the order entry you check if there is enough stock to fulfill the order at the requested delivery date. If the order cannot be delivered immediately, the ATP specifies when enough goods are available and confirms this date as the delivery date.

Allocation Run – The special situation of the apparel and footwear industry requires an optimization of the assignment of existing stock to open requirements. If a stock shortage occurs, the allocation run ensures an optimal assignment of stock to the open requirements. The allocation run distributes the currently available stock to due sales orders according to certain calculation logics at a specific time. If the ordered quantities are larger than the actually available stock, you can use the allocation run to reach the best customer satisfaction under the given circumstances in your business.

In Production

Markers Production Lots

Combined Orders – With this function you can group several production orders. The combined production orders can use the same component or have the same operation in the routing.

The functions you can execute for combined production orders include:

• releasing combined production orders at the same time
• posting the goods issues for all component quantities from the combined orders at the same time
• confirming operations at the same time that are carried out for the combined orders

For more information on these features, I urge you to visit http://help.sap.com/saphelp_afs50/helpdata/en/b2/53ae56cda511d2aca20000e829fbfe/frameset.htm

Hope you found this post useful, feel free to send me your comments and suggestions to ssurenlk@msn.com

Have a nice day !!

S.Suren

There are many people out there who are trying to understand SAP. Although this site is mainly for SAP professionals, I thought of putting up a post on SAP R3 which will help people who are looking for information on SAP.

What is SAP R/3?

SAP standards for System Application and Products in data processing. And the term R/3 defines the SAP three layer architecture. Those three layers are;

1. Data Base layer
2. Application Layer
3. User interface Layer.

SAP is the largest business software provider in the world. They are based in Germany. SAP currently employees more than 40,000 employees and serves more than 41,000 customers all over the world. Total number of SAP users exceeds 12 million in number worldwide.

SAP is mainly an ERP or an Enterprise Resource Planner. It approaches business by covering key business elements from its modules which will be integrated to cater the requirements of the business. These modules are logically and operationally divided mainly based on the functionality. Material Management, Sales and Distribution, Finance and Controlling are some of these modules. Materials Management module covers the supply chain functionality from requirement generation for the ordering, purchasing, logistic handling, goods receipt, stock handling, physical counts, goods issues and transfers and invoice verification. Sales and distribution module on the other hand will cover the order receipt and goods delivery to the customer.

SAP has its main or the standard product along with its industry specific solutions. There are more than 25 industry specific solutions (List of SAP IS) some of them are SAP for Oil & Gas and SAP for Chemicals. These industry specific solutions are fine tuned to cater the special requirement of a particular industry. SAP AFS (which is my blog’s area of focus) is catering the special requirements of the apparel and footwear industry. In this case requirements of the industry to handle its materials in sizes and colors have been catered apart from the standard SAP functionality for an example.

Brief history of SAP – From R1 to R3

SAP started its journey in 1972. Five of the former IBM employees started the organization called System Applications and Products for data processing to give the businesses a standard solution to process their data real time.

The first SAP product was its financial accounting software and it is called R1. Sometime later the R/2 was developed. R/3 started in 1990’s. Now SAP is moving to the world of web and its applications are becoming very interactive and web based.

SAP Advantages

SAP has tons of experiences with them. Almost all the business best practices are built into the system. When a customer goes for SAP apart from the solid software they get the business best practices.

SAP is a fully integrated system. All the modules of the system combine seamlessly. All the processes are linked and financials automatically takes place in the background.

SAP is a robust and tested system. With its 120,000 installations in 120 countries for 41,000 plus customers with more than 12 million users SAP is tested both in terms of time and volume. It is robust and fast when considering the amount of the data that the system processes.

SAP’s support is another key advantage for its users. Upgrading is also possible without much of an effort.

Above are only some of the advantages and services a customer and user will get when they use SAP. For more information visit the SAP.com

SAP R3 is growing fast. So I will keep updating this section. If you have any comments please leave it here or mail me on azwath@yahoo.com

Resources:
http://www.sap.com/
http://www.sap.com/about/company/history.epx

• Banking
• Defense & Security
• Healthcare
  • Healthcare Providers
• Higher Education & Research
• Insurance
• Public Sector
  • Public Security
• Aerospace & Defense
  • Aerospace and Defense Manufacturers
  • MRO/M&E Service Providers
• Automotive
  • Automotive OEMs
  • Sales and Service Organizations
  • Automotive Suppliers
• Chemicals
• Consumer Products
  • Food
    Beverage
  • Home and Personal Care
  • Consumer Durables and Home Appliances
  • Apparel and Footwear
• Engineering, Construction & Operations
  • Homebuilding
    Construction
  • Engineering & Design
  • Shipbuilding
  • Commercial Real Estate
  • Facilities Management
• High Tech

• Business, Medical, and Consumer OEMs
• EMS Providers
• Semiconductor and Component Manufacturers
• Software Providers

For more information visit:
http://www.sap.com/industries/index.epx

1. Expand Scope of Check for AFS

IMG Path: Production -> Shop Floor Control -> Operations -> Availability Check -> Expand Scope Check at AFS

Activity Importance : Critical Activity

Here you can make additional settings for the control of the availability check (ATP). You can make AFS-specific settings for each combination of check group and checking rule within the ATP.

Checking rule for the availability check

Use 1:

This rule defines the checking procedure to be used for the availability check (or in Inventory Management, the missing parts check) in individual applications.

Use 2:

It defines, together with the checking group, the different MRP elements that make up this key figure in Flexible Planning.

Brief Explanation…

The whole purpose of this settings is to determine the type of availability check that the system needs to carry out and based on what criteria, if for example is we are to do an availability check for receipts of materials, then we can define the settings such that the system checks if the availability of the material comes from production orders or from purchase order, and as for issues, when checking the availability we can define if for example the sales order and dependant requirements are taken into account during the check.

2. Define General AFS Specific Control Parameters

IMG Path: Production – > Material Requirement planning -> Plant Parameters -> Define General AFS Specific Control Parameters

Activity Importance : Critical Activity

In this section you can carry out general, MRP-relevant settings for a plant.

Activities to be done:

Restrict the number ranges for planned orders, purchase requisitions, and planned independent requirements. Specify the SKU horizon and determine the pegging logic.

Brief Explanation…

Once the MRP is run, this creates purchase requisitions or planned orders for the planned order requirements, and the number ranges for planned orders, purchase requisitions, and planned independent requirements can be setup in this setting.

3. Define MRP Modules to Control Category Assignment (AFS)

IMG Path: Production – > Material Requirement Planning -> Planning -> Define MRP Modules to Control Category Assignment (AFS)

Activity Importance : Critical Activity

In this section you define the MRP modules you use in maintaining the category assignment during the planning run. The MRP module is used for the assignment of stock categories to requirements categories.

Example

Module M1 means that the entire stock, all purchase requisitions, and purchase orders that are available for the customer’s requested delivery date, are used to satisfy the existing requirements (FIFO – first in first out).

In the configuration you would need to setup the MRP Module and the relevant function module for this.

Brief Explanation….

The MRP module controls the assignment of the requirement categories to the stock categories. Module M1 uses a strategy where all batches of stock, purchase requisitions and purchase orders which are available on the requested delivery date (sales order) and assigned to the stock category, will be used to satisfy the requirement.

It is important that you have a clear idea of the function module in order to specify the setting for this MRP Module.

Hope you found the above post useful. I shall update more posts such as this in the future.

Have a nice day.

S.Suren

ssurenlk@msn.com