A leading Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) manufacturer needed to transform their country-based forecasting, demand and supply planning processes and realise the benefits of a standardised Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) organisation and processes.
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
One of Europe's largest and fastest growing technology distribution and specialist service providers, needed to reduce overall freight cost per unit.
Rocket Consulting enabled transport process automation to speed up decision making and drive down cost per pallet.
The Challenge
To provide a transportation management platform to reduce logistics cost of supplying products from over 350 technology brands to a customer base of 22,850 retailers and resellers and improve decision making capability.
The Solution
A UK first for Rocket who, as a trusted SAP partner, has been approved to deploy the latest Ramp-up release of SAP Transportation Management (TM) 9.3 on HANA which will be used to automate and optimise package building, resource planning, carrier selection and freight costing. Real time access to logistics business intelligence and embedded analytics has been achieved thanks to SAP HANA and Smart Dashboards from Fiori.
Business Outcomes
- Transport process automation
- Moving away from time-consuming siloed manual processes and system
- Drive up vehicle fill rates
- Drive down cost per pallet
- Speed up decision making based on real-time business intelligence
- Running better and better decision making
Planned Go-Live
Q1 2018
One of Europe's largest and fastest growing technology distribution and specialist service providers needed to decrease their cost-to-serve and increase profitability.
Implementing SAP Extended Warehouse Management, Smart business and HANA Fiori, Rocket Consulting provided true operational excellence.
The Challenge
Rocket’s client required a tightly integrated logistics execution platform, supplying products from over 350 technology brands to a customer base of 22,850 retailers and resellers as part of a supply chain expansion programme. Key challenges include improving profitability of high-volume, low margin business.
The Solution
Another UK first for Rocket who, as a trusted SAP partner, has been approved to deploy the latest Ramp-up release of SAP Extended Warehouse Management on HANA. Extensive warehouse process optimisation, automation and mobilisation will form the foundation.
HANA will enable third party billing to significantly reduce third party logistics operational overheads, additionally, real time business intelligence and embedded analytics will improve visibility, traceability and operational management through Fiori’s Smart Dashboards.
Business Outcomes
- Reduce the logistics component of cost-to-serve
- Provide profitable customer services
- Simplify the management and profitability of third party logistics services
- Provide real-time business intelligence
- Speed up decision making and help to run a better operation overall
- Provide true operational excellence
Planned Go-Live
Q1 2018
