SAP S/4HANA for Intelligent Enterprise and Digital Supply Chain 

SAP S/4HANA is a cloud solution that promotes enterprise resource planning in an intelligence-driven manner. An innovative enterprise is one that drives customer experience management by employing a business technology platform strengthened further with a suite of applications.  

Accely’s S/4HANA, with its in-memory database structure, allows companies to have the required intelligence in various operations, including the supply chain.  

The digitized supply chain needs to collect information of various kinds on a real-time basis. Order demand, fleet availability, warehouse availability, market conditions analysis, and other aspects are brought on to a collaborative model and make the process smooth and error-free.  

SAP S/4HANA is available in different modules; some of these modules are explicitly designed to achieve intelligent enterprise fueled by the digitally advanced supply chain. These modules are: 

Advanced Available-to-Promise 

Advancement of available-to-promise brings in intelligence in this basic function. This module helps to design the enterprise resources to match customer demand. There is a constant trade-off between the front and back end happening that this module directs as well as supervises.  

This supervision is available in a device-centric style as the information is available for access in all types of gadgets. With this module, one can: 

• Enable configuration, allotment, and monitoring of product allocation 

• Seamless requirement fulfillment by replacing the original plant with an alternative one on demand 
• Prioritize and re-prioritize demands as per resource availability and delivery demands 

Extended Warehouse Management 

A warehouse is the core strength of any robust supply chain. Several attempts to sophisticate warehouse management have met successful solutions in the S/4HANA WMS module that enables: 

• Easy management of high-volume warehouse 

• Integration of complex supply chain logistics with distribution and warehousing system 
• Optimization of inventory tracking and other functions like multi-channel fulfillment, cross-docking, etc. in real-time 

better coordination, enhanced scalability and flexibility, compliance and transparency, and improved services along with cost-effectiveness are some of the values that S/4HANA delivers and bring intelligence to the digital supply chain model consequently.  

Materials Requirement Planning 

Materials Requirement Planning brings intelligence and seamlessness in working on the digitally designed supply chain by performing functions, such as 

• Prioritized view of material flow issues to enable timely actions 
• System-generated proposals for validated solutions 
• Tailor-made capacity design to adjust to varying quantities 
• Real-time inventory management to ensure automatic ordering and reordering 
• Warehouse exceptional issues management with a focus on the seamless execution of orders 

• Alternative resource management to keep the chain in motion 
• Seamless sourcing and smart contract execution 

Inventory Management 

Inventory management can grow in intelligence when the sophistication of S/4HANA demonstrates its impact on various parts of this process. With the help of the S/4HANA implementation model, the businesses meet the requirements of inventory management driven by better seamlessness in the overall process and better coordination among various trigger points like resource pool, market demand, warehouse demands, goods-in-motion, and so on. 

Some of the common advancements achieved by the S/4HANA in inventory management are: 

• Integration between SAP and e-commerce platforms to make online businesses more responsive to situations 
• Batch updates for faster and more streamlined inventory data management 
• Bird’s view of the storage and manufacturing plant data to make quicker decisions 
• Change in inventory management design according to business cycle stage and demand analysis results 

With provision for integrating Big Data, IoT, and Blockchain kind of futuristic technologies, SAP modules are promising extended relevance for the coming times. Thus, the best time to migrate to S/4HANA is now. 

Here is how to carry out the migration 

Migration to SAP’s S/4HANA involves three following phases: 

• Assessment: The experts need to assess the requirement and challenges to tackle as well. Setting up a timeline can enable adopting a disciplined approach. Take into account all problems with on-premises systems and make a list of loopholes to plug in. 
• Parallel Optimization: Transferring the system to the S/4HANA cloud and copying functionalities there to compare and coordinate processes. 
• Transformation: Moving to SAP S/4HANA through deployments enables the introduction and implementation of new features in the process. 

When SAP S/4HANA is employed, the users also get analytics support and virtual bot support empowered with AI, known as CoPilot.  

Let’s Conclude 

To conclude, moving to S/4HANA is a step taken well in the direction of better performance and intelligent working of the supply chain. If digitization is the requirement, S/4HANA from SAP is the perfect answer.