Part 1 of this series gave you a short introduction to the trends in supply chain management and an overview of SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions for Supply Chain. Now, in part 2 we’re bringing you the most up-to-date info on entry level package offerings that address demand- driven supply chain. Today let’s get started with demand signal management.
This is a hot solution—one, because it addresses your company’s competitiveness, and two, because it operates on SAP HANA, increasing the speed and processing of your biggest supply chain and demand data:
SAP Demand Signal Management rapid-deployment solution
Key take away: Using the power of SAP HANA, this solution provides visibility into the market demand driving the requirements for your supply chain.
Demand signal management is the enabler of better demand visibility and the true demand-driven supply chain. Changes in demand, caught early, can help the supply chain manager keep the company more competitive. Properly considering demand signals help you to ensure higher forecast accuracy and, lower inventory, and to avoid out-of-stock situations, for example, by providing a foundation to analyze point-of-sale (POS) data from retailers. By granting visibility into market research data to your sales and marketing organizations, it also helps to better prepare and evaluate the effectiveness of product launches and promotions.
Latest supply chain management
research by Gartner suggests that using demand sensing capabilities within your planning efforts is regarded as being one of the most influential best practices in demand supply planning, today. Even though the importance is widely recognized by many supply chain experts, the use of demand sensing capabilities is still limited - producing a big gap between older processes and state-of-the art supply chain management. Here is a
study that can help you to explore challenges in demand signal management and capabilities used in the consumer goods industry.
Generally, processing this type of update and downstream data can seem to take a long time if run through traditional systems. Or, even worse, this type of data may have not even been captured at all if you lack the proper system support because the work is too overwhelming for the existing systems to handle. However, this is an ideal situation for the use of SAP HANA: this technology easily handles big data, especially when there is an enormous amount of data to process and a need to transform it into a comprehensive report on key supply chain indicators.
This rapid-deployment solution, which is powered by the SAP HANA platform, allows you to increase the demand visibility into your supply chain and get a holistic view on your markets. You can manage massive volumes of external demand data and internal data on the fly and in real time and transform and store them into a single source of truth. This way you increase your market insights, get real-time insights into downstream demand and market development, avoid lost sales and strengthen customer retention.
Core features are data load management, data quality validation, data harmonization, data enrichment, and process flow control, as well as reporting and analytics. The pre-configured process can be extended with SAP Data Services software for technical data cleansing. Optionally you can also make use of SAP BusinessObjects solutions to quickly analyze, explore, and visualize large data sets, using the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer and the SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office.
SAP Demand Signal Management rapid-deployment solution - processes flow covered
If your business lacks this type of process or capabilities, consider investigating in SAP Demand Signal Management rapid-deployment solution.
The service for the rapid-deployment solution is designed to take you live within 8 weeks and provides different implementation options: Demand signal management leveraging point-of-sale or market research data, with or without integration of SAP BusinessObjects tools.
Find further information on this solution:
- In SAP Solution Explorer: http://rapid.sap.com/se
Supply Chain Management -> Solutions -> Demand Driven Supply Chain -> Demand Management-> SAP Demand Signal Management rapid-deployment solution
- In SAP Service Marketplace: http://service.sap.com/rds-dsim (requires dedicated authorization)
Stay tuned for
part 3 of this series covering SAP Demand Planning rapid-deployment solution, facilitating the generation of accurate demand plans using automatic forecast models and historical sales data.
Post your questions and comments here or directly reach out to me.
Missed the other parts of the blog series? Find them here: