SAP Manufacturing Industry Challenges – Planning to Shop floor

As in-house IT specialists focus on efforts largely centred around simply keeping operation running and they have only little time to explore new things as well as better mitigation capabilities of SAP system to mitigate industry challenges & pain areas. Also, to increase usability / adoption of SAP manufacturing industry major challenges, pain areas should be addressed.

The major challenges of the industry that I have come across in my experience are:

a.?????Complex BOM Structure / management

b.????Material requirement planning with constraints & validations

c.?????Capacity calculation

Complex BOM Structure / management:

Biggest challenge of industries to manage complex BOM structure through innovations as its mandatory for industries to keep every detail that should be captured in BOM like:

·???????Attachments of BOM items

·???????Product revisions

·???????Characteristics

·???????Quantity calculation of BOM items

·???????Selection BOM items with respect to customer requirements

·???????Change management etc.

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Material requirement planning with constraints & validations:

Mostly industries like pharma, food, textile having major challenge of their short-term as well as mid-term material requirement planning to minimize shortage of material requirements & to reduce wastage of material requirements.

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Also, consideration of validations like:

·???????Manage shelf-life stocks

·???????Vendor specific material level stocks

·???????Product revision stock

·???????Lot-size decisions etc.

are the biggest task/challenge for every planner.

Capacity calculation:

Mostly industries like steel, textile having major pain area for capacity calculation at down level of BOM’s for multiple final FG products.

Capacity / Machine allocation of demand based on constraints like:

·???????Setup time on machines

o??Material to material

o??Start of material etc.

·???????Machines & Material Mappings

·???????Lot size wise machine & material mappings

·???????Clubbing of down-level materials on machines

·???????Clubbing of different materials with material attributes / characteristics

Solutions to mitigate above challenges, with this, manufacturers can achieve benefits like:

????????Manufacturer should have little to no waste for their shipments to be profitable by opting re-inspections for reusable raw material after inspections applicable for certain materials.

????????Inventory can be optimized with net off logics addition in MRP execution

????????Quality disputes can be annoying and expensive. With an objective basis for decisions, you can handle more disputes with data and won’t have to worry about paying to bring inspectors out

????????Systems automatically track changes to BOMs and identify discrepancies that can occur when multiple departments, such as engineering and manufacturing, generate BOMs for the same product

????????Reduces the preparation time that manufacturing takes into account and there is no delay in production side as everything is available on time