Remember the days when our Supply Chain efforts focused on calculating the optimal inventory quantities, improving an availability check, reducing forecast bias, and building out technology roadmaps? Now we check Twitter each morning to know what trade policies have changed and dive into war rooms to assess tariff and tax implications on everything from our product routing to free trade zone positions. Our customers are experiencing direct supply chain modeling impacts by two major political events that have taken place over the last ~24 months: Brexit and the US tariff “trade war”. They are all asking the question: how do you keep your planning, execution, and processes in sync with an ever-changing environment?
Recall in 2015, SAP announced that Available to Promise capabilities would be built from the ground up in the core S/4HANA solution. At the time, the rationale for this strategic decision was to build next generation order promising functionality that would be simple to use and implement, while leveraging the central S/4HANA digital core platform. Now that aATP is becoming very real on the 1809 platform, we have hands-on config/modeling experience exploring cool new features like Segmentation while also providing tangible detailed comparisons to what is already available on the fully capable legacy global ATP platform.
One of the key obstacles for this approach would be that SAP customers, especially those already using APO’s global ATP (gATP), would have to wait for the promise and roadmap availability of key functionality offered in a brand new order promising engine within S/4HANA. Some of these current roadmap gap items include: Multi-Level (component) ATP, Product Substitution, and Capable to Promise
When it comes to the global Supply Chain, there are few places in the world more centrally critical than Singapore and to ensure our existing and prospective clients are properly serviced in that region, SCMA has opened a local office to be run by me… our co-founder and President, Scott Barrett.
