Supply chain management from IBM and SAP

The goal - Optimize your supply chain

Information visibility and collaboration of orders, plans, supplies, inventory and shipments is key to successfully coordinating all aspects of your supply chain. The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP is designed to help drive efficiency through your network, optimizing supply chain operations.

The advantage - Gain the most out of your supply chain

The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP allows you to respond more quickly to your customers' needs, while enhancing business-process continuity and risk management.

Transform your traditional supply chain into an adaptive network, sharing knowledge and easily adjusting to changing market conditions. The solution includes:

• For industrial machinery and components: an advanced make-to-order scenario and a Web browser-based scenario for a lean, supplier-managed inventory process.
• For consumer products: scenarios that include enhancements for optimized demand and production planning and for sales order processing, a lean procurement process and collaborative supply chain management.
• For discrete industries: scenarios to optimize supply chain and production processes and meet customer demand.

The benefits - Complete supply chain management

The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP can provide the ability to:

• Plan, execute and coordinate every aspect of your supply chain more efficiently and effectively.
• See your entire business as a group of enterprises, partners, suppliers and customers acting as a single network, rather than a single entity.
• Expand your simple inter-company communication to improve collaboration, helping to cut response times from days to hours or even seconds.
• Streamline overall operations by improving asset utilization and reducing order cycle times to create a responsive, efficient and adaptive supply chain.
• Reduce capital investment with more efficient and accurate production and distribution plans.
• Reduce costs by increasing inventory turnover on the shop floor and in the warehouse.
• Create better order fulfillment rates to expand product margins.
• Increase revenue through advanced information sharing and improved response to unanticipated changes in demand.
• Share knowledge and easily adjust to changing market conditions.

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The goal - Optimize your supply chain

Are you collaborating with your suppliers, vendors and customers as effectively as possible? Can you handle increased customer response times, while shortening order and product cycle times? The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP is designed to help streamline your overall supply chain.

The advantage - Why IBM and SAP?

The IBM and SAP alliance has combined SAP's powerful enterprise software with IBM's global e-business infrastructure to create a unified, open-standard e-business platform for over 30 years. Together, we can help you implement new systems and help get the most out of your supply chain.

• We have more than 700 joint mySAP supply chain management implementations around the world, across the public and private sectors.
• IBM Global Services has a dedicated team for implementing joint IBM and mySAP Supply Chain Management projects.
• Our extensive reach and scale can help the complex, inter-enterprise and international nature of supply chains.
• IBM has established Supply Chain Research Labs with leading universities to simulate the workings of a complex supply chain.

The benefits - Gain the most out of your supply chain

The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP is designed to help you get the most out of every aspect of your supply chain operations, including:

• Planning—supply chain design and planning for demand and inventory, manufacturing and transportation.
• Execution—material management, warehouse management, manufacturing and order and transportation execution.
• Coordination—supply chain event and performance management.
• Collaboration—support for Collaborative Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment (CPFR), vendor managed inventory (VMI) and supplier managed inventory (SMI).

Once implemented, our solution can help your enterprise:

• Ensure that production materials are available in the right places at the right times.
• Determine the right shipping mode, carriers and routes based on the lowest total cost of delivery, while respecting transportation constraints.
• Assess product availability across a global fulfillment network and have access to build or substitution capabilities, while improving delivery time and total cost.
• Monitor your supply chain processes and gain visibility from price quotation to product delivery.
• Check status, receive automatic alerts and integrate inventory information—from supplier to manufacturer—into existing systems.

The approach - Real world results

Many companies have looked to us for help with sales planning and data management systems.

For one European shelving system manufacturer, our solution offered a new system that integrated sales planning for accurate calculations right through to the individual shop floor areas. Also included was long-term data stimulation planning, which entailed about 150,000 data records. The SAP system enabled parallel planning and production for both custom and mass production shelving units, giving precise control of production orders and exact availability checking.

Since the implementation, the company's productivity has risen by nearly 25%, while stocks and legal times have been reduced by around 15%.

The financial advantage - Complete supply chain management solution

The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP can help you get the most out of your investment.

• Reduce capital investment with more efficient and accurate production and distribution plans.
• Reduce costs by increasing inventory turnover on the shop floor and in the warehouse.
• Create better order fulfillment rates to expand product margins.
• Increase revenue through advanced information sharing and improved response to unanticipated changes in demand.

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The issues - Manageable infrastructure

Do you want to transform your existing linear supply chain systems into an open, adaptive supply chain network? The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP can help integrate the planning, execution, coordination and collaboration elements of your supply chain into a successful, manageable infrastructure.

The benchmark - Proven technology

The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP is:

• Optimized for use with open Internet standards, including HTTP, XML, Web services and J2EE™environments.
• Certified on IBM System servers for maximum performance.
• Integrated to provide e-business solutions for businesses of all sizes.

SAP NetWeaver, a comprehensive integration and application platform, is an integral component of mySAP Supply Chain Management. By reducing the need for custom integration, it helps you lower total cost of ownership and enables an Enterprise Services Architecture that allows:

• Business agility.
• Fast implementation.
• Efficient upgrades and system replacements.
• Reduced data volume and functional redundancies.
• Outsourced services.
• Increased revenues from core competencies.
• Expanded reach.

The components - The tools and technology you need

The supply chain management solution from IBM and SAP is designed to manage your enterprise-wide supply chain network.

Key components of the mySAP Supply Chain Management solution include:

• SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer (SAP APO).
• SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW).
• SAP Event Management.
• SAP Inventory Collaboration Hub (SAP ICH).
• SAP NetWeaver—a coherent, scalable technology platform that lets you integrate your existing technologies, while creating a foundation for a new generation of flexible, cross-enterprise processes.

IBM also offers some of the best in hardware, middleware and services.

• IBM DB2® Universal Database™
• IBM WebSphere®
• IBM Tivoli® software
• IBM Lotus® software
• IBM System servers, including:
  • IBM System x™ Linux™ servers
  • IBM System i™ servers
  • IBM System p™ UNIX® servers
  • IBM System z™ servers

IBM Global Business Services draws on its full breadth of supply chain management capabilities to address the challenges that clients in all industries are facing. Our consulting and implementation services can help you plan, design, implement and run your new supply chain solution. Services can include:

• Supply chain strategy
• Supply chain planning
• Logistics
• Procurement
• Asset management
• Supply chain operations
• Product lifecycle management

The implementation - Technology that works

Indigo, a Canadian book retailer in Canada, needed to improve the efficiency and accuracy of its supply chain processes. IBM and SAP provided a supply chain management solution to help the company improve its ability to tailor their product mix and respond more rapidly to changing customer demand.

The solution also included:

• SAP Retail
• SAP Enterprise Portal
• SAP Business Intelligence
• IBM System p servers
• IBM System x servers
• IBM TotalStorage® Enterprise Storage Server
• IBM AIX®

Benefits included:

• Ability to reallocate processing resources to manage seasonal peaks.
• Real-time access to accurate sales information.
• Annual reduction of more than C$150,000 in operational IT costs.
• Improved integration between online and bricks-and-mortar operations.

The cost of ownership - Lower your total cost of ownership

The supply chain management from IBM and SAP can help you cut overall IT costs and lower total cost of ownership by offering:

• A single, flexible solution that can grow with your needs and help reduce resource expenditures.
• Open architecture that allows for quick, virtually seamless integration with new and existing systems, Internet standards such as HTTP, XML, and Web services and J2EE™ environments, reducing overall costs.

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