Product Lifecycle Management Blogs by SAP
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PKB25
Advisor
Advisor
805
Insight to Action - Co-Innovation in a virtual world - hands on testing - sharing road-maps - discuss concepts and learn from other customers -

FOCUS on Integration within SAP´s solutions



On April. 22-23. SAP and interested customers conducted the first 2020 Co-Innovation council for
SAP Product Lifecycle Costing –  a solution to calculate costs and other dimensions for new products or quotations in an early stage of the product lifecycle, to quickly identify cost drivers along the lifecycle, and to easily simulate and compare alternatives.

This time the council was held in a virtual set-up with using all techniques to make it still not a slide show but to strive for real insights to action.

The product GA now since three years was and is still developed in a true Co-Innovation exchange with customers. Among those Automotive Suppliers, Automotive OEMs and Industrial Machinery companies as well as CP Products customers and representatives from the High Tech and the Oil & Gas Industry.

In this first 2020 virtual council  – in total SAP hosted 60 attendees from customers representing the industries mentioned above.

LIVE Hands on Testing: After introducing the capabilities of the latest release of SAP Product Lifecycle Costing 4.2 customers were able to test the latest product online in small teams.
All equipped with a moderator and a note taker making sure to capture the feedback of the customers.
We also used MURAL to enable the whole team to give online feedback. In addition we also used a Qualtrics survey to hear how the overall set up and event went.


REALITY CHECK Roadmap Interactive Session: on the second day we offered a session where customers were able to learn in detail the new upcoming capabilities and features and give feedback to each individual topic. All sessions have been recorded and shared among the team. We got great feedback which we used to weave it into current product specification before we start to code.

Integration will come true: One of the cornerstones for the future product direction is to ensure PLC can integrated with other planning applications (e.g. Integrated business planning) or Intelligent Product Design making sure that the end to end value chain can already benefit in the beginning from that Data recorded in PLC.

LEARN FROM CUSTOMER: Last but not least we had two great customer presentations which got great feedback. Other customers learned from different industries, got ideas for their own PLC System Setup.

At this event all participants have been truly stunned by a customer presentation when a global engineer to order company outline how they are using our system today to calculate their whole Engineer to order products.

PLC has been developed for global tender projects and they wanted to make better use of their SAP ERP systems and more important the data. One of their challenges was to get the full picture of the upcoming demand currently being tendered. And especially without knowing the future demand it was quite hard to make sure to use the global volumes as their buying power towards the suppliers. But since competition is getting harder in this business they had to sharpen their pencils.

With a new app developed on top of PLC and ERP data they made sure that now the company is able to strengthen their insights into global volumes and leverage the buying power.

  • Benefits are one global data base for the use of quotations,

  • better traceability,

  • better demand and supply overview,

  • easy to consume web front-end


Also a global wind turbine manufacturer presented their global PLC installation which the use to cost all of their wind turbines along their global value chain. They use PLC from early stage of new products or projects to mature bill of materials to do their group costing. Every month they run 30.000 calculations. They have more than 16.000 multi level BOMs which they use to explode and do multilevel group costing. They also deriving their procurement inputs into these big calculations to make sure that also the prices of the procured parts are as accurate as possible.

In future they want to utilize PLC from and early project definition till the project is closed and handover to finance. While running different costing models from early cost estimate down to the detailed estimate for delivering the products. triggering 150 projects with 3 different plants creating 450 calculations. Their wish is more mass functionality which we will for sure consider.

Overall Feedback: Net Net the customers and the SAP team liked the virtual format, the event went well. Testing and customer presentations also the roadmap discussions was perceived well.

But we all agreed that an in person event will be nice next time.

Stay healthy!