Current Projects

The Challenge

Our customer, a leading Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) manufacturer and marketer of branded consumer lawn and garden products was managing very seasonal business demand with manual planning processes that were very iterative and time consuming and had to deal with the complexities of constrained warehouse and production capacity, and raw materials supply constraints. This situation was making it impossible for the business to break the cycle of reactive demand and supply adjustments, resulting in regular production capacity problems and too much inventory.

This situation was compounded with the challenge of managing across 7 global sales offices that were independently creating sales forecasts without any consensus between them and independent demand plans onto shared suppliers (both own and outsourced) at different times and across multiple iterations, resulting in poor forecasting accuracy.

The business was also undergoing a transformation and restructuring program including the implementation of SAP S4 HANA ERP platform.

The Approach

Working as the SAP IBP Implementation partner across the full project lifecycle Rocket are responsible for:
• Design and implementation of SAP IBP S&OP
• Integration between S4/HANA & SAP IBP
• SAP IBP training

Using the Rocket Cloud Accelerator Methodology for SAP IBP provided the client with three key success factors:
- Best Practices led approach to quickly define new Sales & Operations Planning, organisational structure and ways of working with high alignment to SAP IBP S&OP
- Provide a fixed price, fixed scope rapid implementation timeline across the entire organisation
- Allow the business planning teams to quickly explore SAP IBP S&OP using the Rocket S&OP model company, giving visibility of the end solution very early in the project to accelerate scope and design decisions

Benefits of Approach
o Combined business process engineering and system led design process
o Rapid deployment using predefined best practices
o Minimised theoretical design
o Agile approach to refinements based on hands on experience
o Roll-Out plan to suit organisation

The Solution

It was decided to tackle the planning challenges with the design and implementation of a globally aligned Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) process underpinned by the SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) S&OP platform fully integrated using SAP Cloud Platform Integration Data Services (SAP CPI-DS) into SAP S4 HANA.

We created a tailored Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Sales & Operations (S&OP) cycle with planning views to support all steps across 7 countries:
Forecasting Preparation (Week 1)

- Revise Portfolio, Substitutions and Modifications
- Cleanse Sales History
- Revise Segmentation
- Revise Statistical Forecast Models

Demand Planning (Week 2)
- Statistical Forecast Calculation (Load and revise Statistical Forecast)
- Sales and Marketing Forecast (Discuss Sales & Marketing Forecast, Add Campaigns, Events, Promotions etc)
- Demand Corrections (Review Demand Plan Alerts & Take Action)

Supply Planning (Week 3)
- Release Forecast
- Supply Planning Calculation (Review Safety Stocks & Supply Targets, Run Heuristic Planning)
- Supply Corrections (Review Planning Alerts & Take Action)

S&OP Review (Week 4)
- Plan Versioning / Simulations, (What If Scenarios, Capacity Review, Supply & Demand Versions)
- S&OP Meeting (Review Planning Versions and Discuss/Agree Financial Adjustments)
- Publish Plan (Live Version)

Integration

The real time integration to and from SAP S4 HANA using SAP CPI-DS includes S4 master data (products, locations, customers, transportation lanes, vendors) and transactional data (actuals, stocks, forecasts, orders) sent to IBP. SAP IBP data interfaced back to S4 HANA includes planned orders, purchase requisitions, stock transfer requisitions to drive S4 supply chain processes.

The Rocket Cloud Accelerator Methodology for SAP IBP allowed the solution to be highly aligned to standard SAP IBP S&OP, with additional value being driven by a small number of key enhancements and Rocket IBP add-ons:
- Capacity Check at Subcontractors Production: Using new key figures for capacity check and capacity levelling including alerts of overloaded resources at Subcontractors.
- Promotions Management: Using purpose made views including prices, discounts and promotions IDs per days to facilitate the work of sales and marketing departments and easily see the impact in the forecast as well as in the financial key figures of these promotions.
- S4 HANA Localisation of Orders IDs: New planning levels with orders IDs allow easy localisation of orders in S4 HANA system. The tailored view allowed historical analysis of orders (production, purchasing and stock transfer orders) to be easily performed.
- Safety Stock Calculations: Bespoke safety stock calculations that takes into account variability of demand and supply. Formulae include forecast, actuals, service level and lead times to generate an accurate and variable in time safety stock in both units and days that comes into the Heuristic calculation.

Planned Go-Live

Q1 2019