by Madhup Mukund Paturkar & Yudhishthir Shrikant Joshi
Integration between Supply Chain partners with efficient data sharing is the need of the hour. The multifold business growth and expansions naturally accentuated the importance of Logistics and storage and its integration with overall supply chain. As the business extracted synergy out of upward integration as well as inorganic growth, they also expected the Enterprise solutions to complement this synergy.
by Sanjeev Pandey
SAP SCM Practice
Deciding on supplier collaboration solution from SAP can be elaborate exercise as SAP provides multiple products in this area.
One is SAP SNC (Supply Network Collaboration) which is part of SAP SCM suite. The other product is SUS (Supplier Self Services) from SAP SRM suite. Though there is some noise about merging of these two similar products by SAP, still concrete information is yet to come on this front. So how do we decide which product to choose for supplier collaboration?
Continue reading " Deciding on SAP Supplier Collaboration solution dilemma - SAP SNC or SUS? " »
Continue reading " SAP SCM at Sapphire 2011 - what to look for " »
Using package software solutions for Enterprise Resource Planning Solutions (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for enterprise business transformation is very appealing. The reasons are many, not the least of which are:
• Speed: Accelerated implementation
• Knowledge: Built on industry best practices
• Simplicity: Pre-integrated application suite or "stack"
Companies often speak of "vanilla" implementations where there is a strong reliance on "out-of-the-Box" functionality to drive process and organizational change. However, it is a mistake to rely on software alone. Although fast implementation to achieve a target ROI is desirable, there are some risks that must be addressed.
Continue reading " Don't rely on software alone to drive process transformation " »
The recent global recession has forced many manufacturing companies to look into extreme cost cutting measures and liquidate their inventories. With the world now in a stage of economic recovery, consumers are opening their wallets again and are demanding more goods, leading to an increase in production output for manufacturing organizations. But rather than simply ramping up productivity, workforce and inventory levels to pre global recession levels, many manufacturers are first carefully investigating now how they can accommodate the increasing demand with their existing organization and production assets. After an era and years of industry wider restructuring, with increased globalization, mergers and acquisitions, many global organizations however now come to the rude awakening that their existing tools, structures, processes and data don't provide them the insights they are looking for to make sound strategic and operational decisions.
Continue reading " Outcome and value based pricing engagement models " »
Continually changing turbulent economic environment is forcing organizations to adopt innovative business strategies to stay competitive, efficient in order to achieve highest level of benefits to the stakeholders. Procurement function is playing an ever increasing role in this transformation journey and its importance is becoming increasingly visible.
Continue reading " Optimizing the Design of a Warehouse- Part 1 of 3 " »
Global business houses, in their innovation journey for being competitive, leverage existing distribution channel network evolving with a multi-commerce platform. Internet sales continue to grow healthier even at the economy tried times. Businesses are keen to value add their existing channel assets to collaborate with customers to personalize experiences thereby driving the market demand to enable a customer driven growth.
Your existing dealer, reseller or channel assets need to take advantage of Internet and improve the sales and distribution channels. It will not only be a value add to your existing reseller network asset but also key to establish a customer driven growth.
Improve value chain of your existing channel assets
What if you could provide customers with a unified and guided selling experience across your sales channels with a seamless selling experience integrating the value-add of your reseller network? What if you could leverage the channel without additional investment of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) server? The answer could be to establish lean E-Commerce (focusing pre-sales and sales only) system that can meet such requirements.
E-Commerce solution leveraging your existing infrastructure
An e-Commerce system without additional investment of CRM server, where products, orders and promotions are properly configured to route the sales orders to the distributor. This brings in a truly collaborative commerce with distributor - you - customers with increased focus and participation in the sales cycle.
Distributor (vendor) managed inventory system while you still maintain with frequent updates from the distributor system. Replenishment of inventory could be planned, advised and executed reducing the touch points or improving the automation thereby helping increased focus more on the core activities. Additional core business areas of planning, availability and capability also receives improvised attention.
Collaborative platform
Collaboration with channel asset involving customer will allow active participation of all stakeholders in all aspects of your customer's sales and marketing experience, from shopping and product configuration to order fulfillment and feedback. It is a single platform offering from Infosys based on a composition environment that leverage SAP E-Commerce application. CSR, Customers and Vendor will have a single platform and a single view – bet it orders, products, promotions, status info etc.,
Return on investment (ROI)
Immediate returns are reduced cost of order processing and improved efficiencies. While on a steady state system, your returns include increased customer and partner loyalty and the ability to create strong sell-side partnerships that help differentiate products designed and created by you.
Web Based Channel Platform
Enable e-commerce with SAP ERP without the need for a full CRM implementation. Set up, manage, and extend your online presence to deliver best-in-class business experiences that are Web (2.0) enabled including:
Business benefits
Procurement practitioners have been front runners in adopting changing technology for past few years. Tactical savings in time and hence the cost of acquisition was definitely a leading intent behind this adoption. In the process, practitioners have realized that adapting to newer technology does provide huge information visibility and free up a lot of their operational time to think on much critical issues like source selection, supplier rationalization, low cost country sourcing etc. In the upcoming posts I will focus on some of these evolving technological changes and their impact.
Today let’s confer around evolving trends in Sourcing.
Continue reading " Evolving technology trends in Procurement - Part 1 " »
