Whether it comes in the form of a scathing articles from the NY Post, or more lengthy exposes from HBO's John Oliver, Amazon has found itself in the news recently for how challenging and exhausting it can be as a picker in their warehouse. Some employees say they can easily walk 15-18 miles a day through the cavernous warehouse moving from aisle to aisle picking the little things we buy everyday out of their bins and getting them onto the pack stations. We all know Amazon is a leader in the logistics game so it’s no surprise that we are seeing this as a fairly common problem. We recently implemented an algorithm and digital solution at one of our high-tech clients to help improve and hopefully avoid a similar situation.
Over the past few months SCMA has been actively engaged in progress of advanced ATP in various forms. While several companies have started to launch their S/4HANA roadmap, Order Promising has become a key challenge migrating from the legacy features many take advantage of in APO GATP to the new advanced ATP features on the S/4 HANA system. If your company..
Is about to launch an S/4HANA roadmap
Has plans to perform a POC on aATP with S/4HANA
Is ready to evaluate the gaps between the current order commit and intelligent promise
We conducted a Webinar with SAP covering the basics of aATP as well as demos of the capabilities on April 12th, 2019. The recorded session is below
Did you ever wish Global ATP (GATP in SCM-APO) could schedule orders at a lower level than just product/location, maybe down to a characteristic level? Has the promise of Characteristics Based Planning been elusive to everyone outside of the fashion industry? Well… SAP S/4’s new Product Segmentation capability might finally have bridged that gap.
The simplest definition of Segmentation: an attribute level extension to the material master. The concept comes from the fashion industry, where you can plan your supply/demand at the higher product level without explicit consideration of characteristics explosion such as size, color, and so on. But when the finished good is to be produced and sold, it is necessary to distinguish by the characteristics of the product. In SAP’s new solution, the segment is simply a 40 character field that can be partitioned and configured to store the applicable characteristics of your material. In the segment you can define an intelligent concatenation of the characteristic values or a numeric pointer enabling identification of differentiated elements of material stock. But, probably the most exciting thing about segmentation is that it is supported across the entire logistics process from planning and procurement to production and sales. Basic transactions like the Stock & Requirements list (MD04), Sales order creation (VA01), Stock Overview (MMBE), Purchase Order creation (ME21N) and other transactions are extended to break out supply and demands by Segment.
