| |
| Case Study |
| |
Patni helps Large Consumer Products
Company Improve Demand Planning |
Patni's APO DP based solution improves the efficacy of client's demand planning
processes enabling multi-million dollar annualized savings.
The Client
A Fortune 500 company engaged in the development, manufacture and sale of a wide range of grooming products.
The Challenge
The client was using APO demand planning across all its business units in
Europe. Non-DP geographies managed demand on their own, which caused
inconsistency and lack of coordination in terms of management of demand
and supply. The client desired to implement an APO-DP solution in order to
standardize the demand-planning processes across geographies, so as to
improve the efficacy of the demand planning processes and support future
value chain integration.
The solution had to be designed to meet the following business objectives:
 |
Increase the forecast accuracy and improve fill rates and service levels |
|
Present an integrated view of Demand Planning Information to reduce the
incidence of ad-hoc reporting, number of applications being used and
hardware platforms |
|
Reduce overall inventory levels by reducing in safety stock and stock
write-offs at all regional office |
|
Provide scalability to support future initiatives |
|
Improve business productivity and efficiency based on integrated business
processes and system architecture to significantly improve
competitiveness in target markets |
|
Increase gross profit. |
The major challenge was to harmonize the DP processes and ensure
availability of homogenous data across organization under one platform.
The Solution
Patni made a quick assessment of the sales order history and enterprise data
warehouse (EDW), which served as main inputs for the demand planning
process. Patni was involved in logical design, physical design and development
while the client's IT team was involved in finalization of business and data
requirements.
Patni was responsible for:
|
Customization of APO-DP |
|
Development of suitable data-marts and reports in BW |
|
Development of interfaces with other internal systems such as Manugistics
and Hyperion. |
Some of the highlights of the solution include:
|
The solution was based on APO Demand Planning and SAP Business
Warehouse tools. The Planning process was carried out in APO whereas
reporting was done in BW using OLAP functionality. |
|
A European template was used as a basis of APO DP implementation in all
other regions. This posed a major challenge in this project - since the
European template had to be customized to fit geography specific
requirements in a single global template to reduce number of local objects
such as cubes, ODS, Master Data Info Objects and Batch Jobs. |
|
A single team from Patni carried out all services such as Enterprise
Data Warehouse (EDW), BW and APO. A single coordinator across
various teams with clearly defined roles and responsibilities for all
the team members ensured that the projects goals were met. This
significantly reduced the communication lines and ensured
successful completion of the design and testing phase. |
The Technology
|
SAP BW |
|
SAP Enterprise Portal |
| |
 |
The Benefits
|
Patni's knowledge of SCM processes combined with technical,
domain and environmental knowledge helped the client to meet its
business objectives effectively. |
|
Value Chain Group now acts as the single point of contact for all
demand planning processes across all regions thereby increasing the
integration across planning and procurement functions |
|
The solution helped the client forecast annualized multi-million
dollar savings across all regions. |
|
| |
