Introducing SAP Digital Supply Chain Management (DSC) edition for SAP S/4HANA

The recent global events have disrupted and tested the resilience of even the world’s best supply chain enterprises. These disruptions and their adverse effects on the global economy have brought a paradigm shift in the way governments and companies think about their supply chains. Today’s supply chain is no longer a “behind-the-scenes” organizational function. Rather, it has become a front-and-center competitive differentiator for an enterprise. For most companies, this means digitally transforming their existing supply chains to become more resilient, innovative, and sustainable.

Throughout my 20 years of supply chain experience, I’ve had the privilege of working with supply chain leadership at some of the world’s leading companies. Conversations often include the following problems in the plan-to-fulfill cycle, which hamper the supply chains of a business:

Limited ability to leverage broader digital supply chain innovations and integrate them effectively
Lack of collaboration from engineering to production execution
Limited real-time visibility across plan-to-fulfill business processes
Lack of integration and interoperability between various systems and processes
Unfeasible production plans (not considering demand, supply, and capacity constraints)

The above problems result in businesses losing revenues and, in some cases, even customers due to missed or late deliveries and low fulfillment rates.

To overcome the above mentioned supply chain problems, companies may want to embark on supply chain modernization and digitalization. As we all know, this takes time. However, many companies aren’t willing to wait for an enterprise-wide transformation to see value from their digital investments. Rather, they want to:

Accelerate time-to-value
Lower TCO (by shortening the ideation-to-implementation cycle and lowering costs)
Implement quickly in a decentralized modular approach
Run independently from each other, and hence spend limited effort in upgrades and maintenance
Ensure minimal disruption to existing core systems and applications
Most importantly, plug business-critical gaps in the supply chain

Is there a solution to long-standing challenges in the plan-to-fulfill cycle?

Companies seeking any or all of the above benefits, along with the flexibility to pick and choose relevant capabilities, may wish to consider SAP’s latest offering SAP Digital Supply Chain Management (SAP DSC), edition for SAP S/4HANA. This offering provides the additional benefit of allowing companies to implement their chosen capabilities via side-by-side agile deployment without disrupting their existing core processes.

But before we get into deployment details, it’s worth taking a closer look at what this SAP digital supply chain management solution provides.

The following supply chain solutions or capabilities are available to choose from in the SAP DSC, edition of SAP S/4HANA, supporting the full plan-to-fulfill scenario:

SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM)
Allows you to optimize inventory tracking, cross-docking, distribution operations, labor management, multichannel fulfillment, and more – in real-time.
SAP Transportation Management (SAP TM)
Forecasts demand and shipment volumes accurately, consolidates orders, fine-tune transportation planning, and enhances freight, fleet, and logistics management .
SAP Yard Logistics
Streamlines the planning, execution, and settlement of yard processes with back-end integration and maximizes visibility into yard processes.
SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing for planning and scheduling
Enables you to consider multiple production resources, their capacities, and material-availability constraints in your planning model. Also facilitates comprehensive and synchronized planning and manufacturing processes.
SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing for production engineering and operations
Bridges process gaps between product design, manufacturing engineering, supply chain management, and production operations. Facilitates a seamless digital thread from engineering through production execution.
SAP S/4HANA extended service parts planning (SAP SPP)
Supports planning functions specific to service parts and provides transparency throughout the supply chain — from the moment demand occurs — to the delivery of the product.

It’s now worth taking a deeper dive into the solution for understanding how the SAP DSC edition of SAP S/4HANA can accelerate the digital supply chain journey while keeping core enterprise processes stable.

SAP DSC edition of SAP S/4HANA cloud solution overview

Modularity	A modular framework provides the flexibility to pick and choose the capabilities that are most relevant to your business and industry. Modularity accelerates time-to-value via side-by-side deployment, so you do not have to wait for an enterprise-wide digital ERP transformation.
Interoperability and integration	The offered solutions offer seamless integration and interoperability with other cloud and ERP solutions. This keeps the existing ERP core and relevant business processes stable to streamline the supply chain, manufacturing, and logistics processes. The result — increased visibility and execution insights in real-time.
One code line with SAP S/4HANA	Minimizes disruption and streamlines future innovations, upgrades, and implementations.
User experience and adoption	Seamless cross-integration of the supply chain, manufacturing, and logistics business processes helps with the overall user experience and adoption across the plan-to-fulfill cycle.

Understanding your deployment options

If you are the head of the supply chain or a digital supply chain leader tasked with deploying some or all the SAP DSC solutions, your first decision point deals with how to set up the system landscape to support the specific capability you are implementing in the edition.

System setups can either be side-by-side or embedded. I’ve summarized the benefits of each below:

Deployment options: Embedded vs side-by-side approach to system setup
Side-by-side usage next to ERP	Enables rapid supply chain transformation Modular-focused enhancements integrated with ERP core Enable centralized hub scenarios connected to multiple ERPs Ability to run applications independently from ERP Leverage innovations independent of ERP upgrades and downtimes Dedicated performance for high-volume operations The DSC edition for SAP S/4HANA is deployed as a cloud solution SAP offers a standardized way to move from a side-to-side solution to an embedded solution if, at a later stage, all of SAP S/4HANA is implemented
Embedded usage within S/4HANA ERP	Simplified system landscape One system — direct usage of master data without data redundancy However, dependency for the move from ERP to SAP S/4HANA

Conclusion

Fortunately, the SAP DSC edition for SAP S/4HANA offers benefits no matter where you are on your digital transformation journey.

For those that are still using SAP ECC, this can easily serve as a stepping-stone to broader enterprise transformation offered through SAP S/4HANA. If you have already moved to SAP S/4HANA, the solution allows you to take advantage of new advanced capabilities in planning, manufacturing, and logistics in harmony with the current S/4HANA ERP environment. And for those that are on a non-SAP ERP system (or new to SAP), this can be an important first step in the modernization of your supply chain.

If you want to learn more about how HCLTech can help you on your digital supply chain journey, please contact us at sap@hcl.com.

References

For more information on the SAP Digital Supply Chain Management edition for SAP S/4HANA, please refer to the following pages:

Tags:

Digitalization

SAP

Supply Chain

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