Search Results for: sap-apo

  • What is SAP IBP?

    ByPrimary Researcher

    … pro-SAP financial bias to their readers. 

    S&OP or Full Planning Solution?
    If one reads SAP’s IBP material is confusing as to IBP’s scope. The concept was that IBP would be just S&OP to begin but later grow to encapsulate the planning that exists in the DP, SNP modules at least. GATP and PP/DS have been moved over to S/4HANA, or at least partially. This means that the intent is to keep IBP at a high level of abstraction than SAP APO.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J4ldEby3_0
    This is a …

  • The Definition of Reorder Point

    ByPrimary Researcher

    … 50 of the product locations would be using the MRP supply planning method, and the other 50 would be on reorder point planning. Therefore, a reorder point can be used with or without a specific supply planning method.

    This is the Lot Size tab to the product location master in SAP APO/SCM. As can be seen, there are not a lot of alternatives provided here, just the basics. The reason for this is these reorder points are not designed to control the planning (that is supposed to be performed by heuristics, the optimizer, or CTM.). But instead, these order …

  • Introduction to LaunchPad SAP Support

    ByPrimary Researcher

    Executive Summary

    This page describes the issues with SAP support and how our SAP support offerings help.
    We offer support coverage that exceeds what is available from SAP or from other providers.

    SAP Support Problems
    SAP support becomes a worse value every year. The question is what to do about it. Several of the applications we cover, SAP APO and SAP BW, are at the end of life and have no development future. SAP has virtually no leverage to keep the support business for these products.
    So why continue to pay support dollars on these SAP products, when what SAP …

  • How to Solve MRP Problems

    ByPrimary Researcher

    … of resource capacity information. But while this issue is often directed at methods that perform capacity constraining, it affects all supply/production planning methods. Here again, not all applications are created equal — because the existence of constraining functionality says nothing about how easy or difficult it is to maintain resources. SAP APO has an extraordinarily ineffective and time-consuming resource management functionality, which results in data not being updated as frequently, and a heavy maintenance load. Overall, constrained planning techniques have had a high failure rate on projects, something that promoters of things like cost optimization frequently leave out of …

  • How To Reduce Your SAP Investment

    ByPrimary Researcher

    … adapters means that the integrations are ready to use right online.
    Demand Planning & Supply Planning
    SAP ERP has unusable forecasting functionality, and nearly all companies forecast external to SAP ERP. SAP’s APO or advanced planning application offers some of the worst modules in the supply chain planning space, with TCO that is off the charts (and this does not stop them from being the most recommended by the big bad IT consulting firms)
    Demand Works Smoothie (Brightwork profile here) and Forecast Pro (Brightwork profile here) are quite reasonably priced and highly proven forecasting applications that are easy to …

  • Introduction to Brightwork SAP Support

    ByPrimary Researcher

    Executive Summary

    This page describes the issues with SAP support and how our SAP support offerings help.
    We offer support coverage that exceeds what is available from SAP.

    SAP Support Problems
    SAP support becomes a worse value every year. The question is what to do about it. Several of the applications we cover, SAP APO and SAP BW, are at the end of life and have no development future. SAP has virtually no leverage to keep the support business for these products.
    So why continue to pay support dollars on these SAP products, when what SAP’s support covers is …

  • How to Understand AWS Services for On Premises with VMware Cloud for AWS for Hybrid Cloud

    ByPrimary Researcher

    … are not maintained.
    On SAP projects, it is widespread for all of the boxes are years out of synch with each other. If VMware were being used and used correctly, these old instances would be blown away and replaced by recent production copies. However, only some SAP components, like the SAP APO optimizer, can be placed on virtualization. This means that in SAP projects, it is commonly thought that a full system refresh is not possible, and instead, it seems these SAP environments are using some SAP tool to do a “system copy.”
    The system copy tool that is used …

  • How to Understand The Fake Integration Benefits for ERP

    ByPrimary Researcher

    … that software category. I discuss this in the following articles that I wrote to inform companies that they were significantly underestimating the short-term and long-term effort involved to maintain the SAP ERP to SAP APO integration application called the “core interface” (CIF). The CIF is an SAP-to-SAP interface, but while it can be brought up quickly, it is so maintenance-intensive that over the long term, I debate whether it is better to develop an adapter from scratch in Why I No Longer Recommend Using the CIF.

    ERP companies typically entirely exaggerate how much integration …

  • The SAP Best Practice Scam: How SAP Uses Best Practices to Control the Implementation

    ByPrimary Researcher

    … the risk of system failures and security breaches.” – Wikipedia
    Many companies have relearned this fact about computer systems. Many of the cost overruns of ERP systems were related to replacing business logic.
    Considering the SAP Best Practices Claims in Light of Their Actual Software R&D
    I have worked in SAP APO since 2002 and never found anything in APO that did not exist in other vendors before SAP put it into APO. Other vendors have adopted cost optimization, allocation, and the statistical forecasting methods used by DP, everything in all the modules. However, if we broaden the search for …

  • How Accurate Was Bluefin Solutions on C/4HANA?

    ByPrimary Researcher

    … horizontal integration within the sales and service offerings as well as enlarge the functional coverage for these scenarios, thus allowing SAP to better compete with the likes of Salesforce.”
    SAP ECC was integrated between its modules, but outside of ECC, the integration story quickly degrades. Even internally developed applications like SAP APO have had a problematic integration history connecting to ECC with the CIF. For the acquired products, the integration history is far worse. Its integration XI/PI/PO integration product is one of the weaker offerings covered in How Non-Programming Integration Solutions from SAP Damage Projects.
    The statement …