Release of the New Scenario SAP Readiness Check for SAP Supply Chain Solutions

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As SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (SAP APO) is a component of SAP Supply Chain Management (SAP SCM), and SAP SCM 7.0 will reach the end of mainstream maintenance in the coming years, customers need to plan and migrate from SAP APO to SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP), leverage the integrated supply chain planning functionality within SAP S/4HANA, or a combination of both.

Today, we proudly announce the general availability of SAP Readiness Check for SAP Supply Chain solutions to assist in planning this transformation. This new SAP Readiness Check scenario provides customers and their partners with insightful information on how SAP APO is used today.

By analysing active SAP APO modules, SAP Readiness Check for SAP Supply Chain solutions supports the definition of the target solution architecture.

SAP Readiness Check for SAP Supply Chain solutions provides customers, implementation partners, and SAP consultants visibility on how the existing SAP APO modules, like SAP APO Demand Planning, SAP APO Supply Network Planning, SAP APO Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling, and Global Available-to-Promise, are implemented, tailored, and consumed.

Unlike the existing verification points presented by SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA, where the checks reveal “must-dos” in support of a possible conversion project to SAP S/4HANA, SAP Readiness Check for SAP Supply Chain solutions is purely informative and is intended to be used as input for discussions between customers, their partners, and SAP to identify the best-fitting target architecture, as well as to help scope initial effort estimations.

What is SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP)?

The SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP) solution is a cloud-based supply chain planning solution that scales to accommodate business growth and integrates with other SAP and third-party systems. It integrates key aspects of the planning process, including demand, supply, inventory, and sales and operations planning (S&OP). Designed to help you streamline planning and improve performance, SAP IBP supports data-driven decision-making and simplified collaboration to increase operational efficiency. SAP IBP delivers this with the help of advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and powerful optimisation algorithms that enable real-time visibility, better forecasting, and faster decision-making across the entire supply chain.
For further information, check the SAP Integrated Business Planning Community.

Supply chain planning functionality available in SAP S/4HANA

• SAP S/4HANA ePPDS
  SAP S/4HANA offers Embedded PP/DS, which brings the SAP APO capabilities into the SAP ERP core. Embedded PP/DS brings many advantages, such as simplified master data maintenance, simplified integration, and planning PP/DS materials in MRP Live.
  The major innovation, however, is related to the user interface with SAP Fiori apps for capacity monitoring and capacity leveling. The SAP Fiori app Monitor Capacity Utilization provides an overview of the capacity load in the resources assigned to the area of responsibility and a detailed capacity overview of a selected resource, including charts and additional details of the capacity load.
  For further information, see S/4HANA Embedded PP/DS: Shift Maintenance in Monitor Capacity Fiori App. | SAP Blogs
• SAP S/4HANA aATP
  Advanced Available-to-Promise (aATP) is a business function in SAP S/4HANA that responds to order fulfillment requests in Sales and Production Planning.
  An order fulfillment request consists of the required material, plant, requested quantity, and material availability date. The response to the request is based on the current stock situation,  future stock receipts, and real-time orders.
  Furthermore, additional restrictions can be applied based on other order attributes (like region or customers). The ATP function generates confirmation proposals for the requested material and plant, including confirmed quantities and dates.
  For further information, see Advanced Available-to-Promise (aATP) | SAP Help Portal.

SAP Readiness Check for SAP Supply Chain solutions

Overview
The dashboard contains the following three tiles:

• Master Data: Shows a summary of active SAP SCM master data components, their identified dependent levels, and the corresponding data volumes in the analyzed system.
• Key Data by Application Area: Provides insights into the key data of the different SCM components used in the analyzed system. This analysis can help to define the target system architecture and the main processes to be activated.
• System Configuration Settings: Offers a summary of the main settings active in the analyzed system to identify requirements for the future solution architecture.

Master Data
The Master Data tile provides the top 6 objects, while the detail view provides insights into all active objects.

The detail view shows the active master data objects and the number of entries, together with additional details like table name, number of objects created last year, and number of user-created objects over the past year. The table can be exported, including all the detailed information provided.

Key Data by Application Area
This tile provides insights into the key data of the different SAP SCM components used within the analyzed system. This analysis helps to define the target system architecture by highlighting the scope and scale of the active capabilities, thus delivering input to the complexity of the data migration project.

The detail view shows the application areas in use for:

• Demand Planning (DP)
• Supply Planning (SNP)
• Capable-to-Match (CTM)
• Global Available-to-Promise (GATP)
• Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS)
• APO Documents

The object level detail helps define what data may need to be replicated to the target SAP Supply Chain solution.

System Configuration Settings
This tile provides an immediate high-level overview of the scenarios used within the system and the relevance of the analyzed objects, supporting the identification of recommended target solutions.

The following configuration settings are considered during the SAP Readiness Check analysis:

• Type of planning used (Building Block / Campaign / Bottleneck / pull capacity planning / Trimming)
• Used statistical models for demand generation
• Used heuristic planning profiles
• Used planning areas for each module
• Planning strategy used, including customized configuration
• Global configuration information referred to module GATP (Global-Available-to-Promise)
• Distribution configuration information
• Layout of the delivery network
• Customized key figures and attributes in the system
• Feature-based prediction settings
• Number of documents managed in APO

 

Getting Started
To set up and run SAP Readiness Check for SAP Supply Chain solutions, the subsequent steps need to be performed:
Follow the instructions in SAP Note 3477050 - SAP Readiness Check for SAP Supply Chain solutions to install the check framework and transport the changes into your target system, such as the productive client of the production system. The note provides detailed and technical information on how to set up and perform the analysis.

Initiate program RC_SCM_COLLECT_ANALYSIS_DATA via transaction SA38 or SE38 to initialize the data collectors.

Select the scope of the analysis by activating or deactivating the corresponding checkboxes. Use the Schedule Analysis button to schedule the data collection. The process runs as a background job to avoid timeout issues.

The runtime of the data collectors depends on many factors, like server capacity, data volumes, and component usage. Therefore, it is difficult to predict the runtime. The data collection process was intentionally designed to avoid contention or interference with production workloads; consequently, you may see longer than expected runtimes. The best way to forecast the runtime for a production system is to conduct the data collection process in a copy of production using a similar hardware configuration.

Once the analysis has finished, you can download the results to your local filesystem using the Download Analysis Data button. The generated data collection archive is a ZIP file containing multiple XML files. All collected data is human-readable and can be easily inspected with appropriate XML viewers.

Launch the SAP Readiness Check cloud application on SAP for Me or from within your SAP Cloud ALM tenant and choose Start New Analysis to upload the ZIP archive. After a few seconds, the results of the newly created SAP Readiness Check analysis can be explored.

As always, we look forward to receiving your feedback!
Your SAP Readiness Check Team