With disruptive changes driven by e-commerce and omni-channel fulfilment, logistics organizations are increasingly facing the challenge to deliver faster, more efficiently and with a higher level of transparency and flexibility, while still looking to optimize resource utilization and reduce costs in the logistics chain.
Logistics organizations, hence, see the need to undertake significant transformation and digitization of their logistics processes to leverage state-of-the-art logistics systems across all areas of logistics – like transportation planning and forecasting, warehousing and yard operations, track and trace and monitoring, freight costing and analytics – in order to establish a high velocity, integrated and responsive end-to-end logistics process.
To meet needs of future growth and increasing automation levels, logistics organizations are looking to run their high-volume logistics operations on an independent logistics platform, deployed independently from their ERP landscape, but natively integrated to their core processes. This allows them the possibility to focus and implement logistics transformation in a modular way independent of ERP transformations, to consume innovations in logistics faster, and leverage dedicated systems resources for high availability warehouse and yard operations at a lower overall TCO.
SAP Digital Supply Chain Management, edition for SAP S/4HANA offers a composable package of SAP S/4HANA solutions and includes the cluster of market leading SAP Digital Logistics components. These include SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM), SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM) and SAP Yard Logistics available in the same platform, with a common database and architecture, that can be implemented in a modular way, allowing the ability to gain core integration benefits with each other.
SAP Digital Supply Chain Management, Edition for SAP S/4HANA spans the following Logistics solutions (see figure below):
- SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM)
- SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM)
- SAP Yard Logistics
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SAP Digital Supply Chain Management, edition for SAP S/4HANA
With SAP EWM, organizations can manage simple to high-volume warehouse operations by applying state-of-the-art automation technologies and optimization techniques. It allows optimization of warehouse resources, inventory tracking, cross-docking, distribution operations, labor management, multichannel fulfillment, and more – all in real time. As part of the edition, SAP EWM also enables dedicated performance for warehouse operations and EWM servers close to the warehouse (or in the same region or time zone as the warehouse).
SAP TM helps organizations improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and maximize the return on transportation spend. It forecasts demand and shipment volumes accurately, consolidates orders, fine-tunes transportation planning, and enhances freight, fleet, and logistics management. As a result, customers can achieve freight spend savings, improved sustainability and real-time visibility into global transportation and domestic shipping across transportation modes and industries.
The SAP Yard Logistics application supports organizations to run more efficient and automated logistics and accelerate digitalization of multi-modal yards. It enables them to streamline the planning, execution, and settlement of yard processes with back-end integration and maximize visibility into yard processes with a range of visualization and reporting tools.
Benefits:
With the modular framework of the SAP Digital Supply Chain Management, edition for SAP S/4HANA, organizations can accelerate time to value by implementing critical supply chain logistics capabilities in a decentralized fashion in incremental steps and adopt new innovations within a shorter timeline without waiting for an enterprise-wide SAP S/4HANA transformation. This can easily serve as a stepping-stone to broader enterprise transformation offered through SAP S/4HANA.
They can also take advantage of the direct real-time process and technical integration between SAP TM, SAP EWM and SAP Yard Logistics to streamline logistics. This offering also integrates seamlessly with
SAP Logistics Business Network to offer flexible network-based collaboration with complete visibility into real-time execution insights.
Provisioning solutions supported by the edition in one system provides significant commercial benefits through shared infrastructure and services, while capitalizing on SAP’s latest innovations helps optimize and streamline supply chain without jeopardizing upgradability.
It can also enable centralized hub scenarios by connecting to multiple ERP instances with the ability to run applications independently from ERP, independent of release cycles and solution providing greater flexibility for mergers, acquisitions, and carve-outs.
The user experience benefits from seamless, cross-functional integration vertically and horizontally for end-to-end scenarios and can be deployed in the cloud for greater agility and accelerated time to value spanning the complete plan-to-fulfill cycle.
For more information on SAP Digital Supply Chain Management, edition for SAP S/4HANA please refer to the following pages