Interview apps4erp
August 22, 2014
For the theme of the year “Complexity and cooperation move logistics 2014”, Mr. Michael Bleier, CEO of ITeanova Consult GmbH, answered questions towards app4erp about the increasing role of IT in the supply chain management.
Complexity and cooperation move logistics 2014. This is a result of a recent survey of members of the German Logistics Association (BVL). Logistic service providers as well as representatives from trade and industry agree that increasing customer requirements, globalization of processes and lengthening as well as branching of supply chains make logistic tasks more complicated.
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How can the manufacturing industry encounter these challenges? We interviewed Michael Bleier, CEO of the SAP consulting house ITeanova Consult GmbH:
“In addition to complex supply chains and product portfolios, today companies are confronted with major demand fluctuations and increasing pressure on costs. For this reason companies strive to maximize the workload of their production plant, short processing times and low stocks. For this purpose, a finite SCM Planning is required, that reaches across all production levels and includes the major suppliers to avoid supply shortages. However, this objective can only be reached with planning procedures that are better and more complex than the conventional. Therefore, it must be ensured that the demand situation can be predicted accurately and changes are reflected in the process as well as in the constraints in a timely manner to SCM Planning.”
What role does IT play in this, especially new trends such as in-memory?
“Instead of isolated solutions, integrated IT systems and collaboration scenarios are requested that include the various business partners. Despite the complexity, supply chains must be controllable and the results must remain comprehensible. This requires the formation of logical but interconnected units for finding solutions and high calculating speed, made possible by the fast database technology SAP HANA. Moreover, the surface and operator guidance of SCM solutions must be such that even large amounts of data can be manageable. They must provide a good overview of the KPIs and allow easy manual changes in production schedules. More importantly, the impact of these changes should be transparent immediately on other SCM components.”
Why does the SAP standard not cover these requirements?
“Nowadays the difficulties of SCM are too diverse to solve with standard software. The SAP SCM solutions provide a framework that can be extended by partners. Therefore, ITeanova provides add-ons for finite scheduling, which consider various bottlenecks and allows a multi-level integration of purchasing and sales. These add-ons resulted from our long-term SCM project experience and have been developed according to specific customer requirements. Additionally, with our solutions we optimize handling/usability and transparency of SAP SCM solutions and if necessary, integrate industry specific features.”
We look forward to hearing from you soon
Your apps4erp Team
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