HOW did the chicken cross the road at Tyson Foods?

[Richard_Howells]

This morning Kenny Rawls from Tyson foods talked about how Tyson Foods are “Simplifying complex supply chains with high performing Transportation Networks”

Tyson foods are a $33 Billion manufacturer of fresh, frozen and refrigerated food products who employee 115,000 people globally across over 400 facilities and offices. They exports products to more than 100 countries globally and plan and execute 15,000 shipments weekly.

Business Challenges

The project objectives is to replace legacy transportation planning application with a solution to support transportation planning and execution for shipments within the Poultry and Prepared Foods business units. In doing so, they needed to address both operational and IT challenges:

• Operations Challenges:
  • Manual, paper-based transportation planning that leads to reduced optimization
    of shipments across Tyson’s transportation network
  • Inability to consolidate shipments to maximize utilization of
    transportation resources
  • Improve scheduling and optimization capabilities
• IT Challenges:
  • Multiple, In-house transportation systems
  • Challenging and costly to support multiple systems and users across
    multiple platforms

Project Scope and Approach

• Deployment across the poultry and Prepared Foods Business Units
• Business Process Scope
  • Special Shuttles (Forwarding Order Management)
  • Intercompany Product Movement
  • Outbound Customer Shipments
• Multiple Modes of Transport including truck, rail, ocean and air
• Phased implementation based on the business process scope , and tightly
  integrated within the overall SAP program in order to minimize risk and
  maximize return on investment

Project Overview

It was explained how, within Tyson, SAP Transportation Management (TM) will support the physical transportation of goods from one location to another. The  transportation Process that are broken down into 4 categories:

• Order management- The initial event trigger in TM.vInvolves receipt of orders that require product movement from one location to another
• Transportation Planning- To plan the movement or transport of the products required
• Transportation Execution- Includes the selection of carriers, initiation of goods issue, creation of a transport order, and trigger the decrement of inventory.
• Financial Settlement- Freight contracts are reviewed to determine the correct pricing, Invoices are generated, and accounting processes are performed

SAP Event Management (SAP EM) will allow Tyson to monitor the end-to-end business processes by matching planned events and measurements with the actual events and measurements to  uncover exceptions.

• Monitoring & Visibility to key Business Processes through monitoring capabilities to any business process.
• Matching Planned to Actual Data , allowing the company to identify exceptions
• Real Time Notification of Events to provide timely data and to react quickly -
• Integration with other systems, both SAP and legacy.

Kenny discussed the benefits of deploying Transportation Management at Tyson :

• Consolidation of transportation solutions to a single platform
• Increased efficiency of internal and external transportation resources through optimized planning
• Improved visibility to total transportation costs across all shipments, for all business units
• Greater visibility and accountability to customer and warehouse requirements
• Support detailed Shipment Scheduling
• Improved ability to incorporate transportation costs into the total material cost
• Support greater integration between warehouse scheduling for door management and transportation appointment management

Finally, Kenny discussed some best practices and lessons learned for implementing Transportation Management::

• Manage scope and amount of change encountered during initial go-live and subsequent roll-outs
  • Amount of functionality
  • Number of locations / shipments
  • Risk and Impact to Customers and Vendors
  • View as business transformation, not just as
    system replacement
• Make sure that the master data is accurate and up to date.
• Work with a trusted implementation partner

And to answer the question – How did the chicken cross the road?  With SAP Transportation Management.

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