Execute Supply Chain Planning

Demand Management is the management of independent requirements. The behavior of independent requirements in material requirements planning (MRP), for example, whether they are effective, or whether they consume other requirements, is determined by their requirements type or by the planning strategy.

Planned independent requirements are stock requirements that can be derived from a forecast of future demand. In make-to-stock production, you want to start procurement of the affected materials without waiting for specific sales orders. This kind of procedure allows you to reduce delivery times and also means that you can use forecast planning to spread the burden as evenly as possible across your production resources.

Sales orders (customer independent requirements) are created in SAP S/4HANA Sales. You can enter customer requirements directly into MRP, depending on their requirement type. This is always beneficial if you want to plan for specific customers.

Sales orders can be used either as exclusive requirement sources, for which procurement is then specifically triggered (make-to-order production), or they can be grouped with planned independent requirements to create the total requirements. Consumption is also possible with planned independent requirements.

In the first step for detailed planning in MRP, the procurement dates and quantities for the required assemblies and components are determined based on the requirements dates and quantities for the finished product (for example, a sales order). Bills of material and routings must be exploded to do this.

Scheduling of procurement for in-house products is carried out using the routing. The production operations to be executed and the length of the individual operations are specified in the routing and calculated based on the formulas in the work center. The assemblies (from the BOM) required for production must be available when production of the finished product is started. Therefore, procurement of these assemblies must be initiated earlier. In this way, assuming the dependent requirements date is the availability date, the system determines the order dates of the components by means of backward scheduling using the in-house production time or planned delivery time.

Your enterprise plans to implement SAP S/4HANA and you want to know about the new SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management (Materials Management and Operations) solution.

The world around us is becoming more complex. There has been an exponential growth of digital information (social, mobile, and big data), an increase of globalization and the spread of business networks, the Internet of Things, and the use of (business) AI. These changes have resulted in heavily transformed business processes, sometimes more complex organizations, and very different (business) software solutions and capabilities.

At the end of 2009, 5% of the world's population owned smart phones. Four years later, that figure jumped to 22%. Currently, there are about 7.41 billion mobile users in the world (estimation for 2024). End of 2025, it is estimated that 20.1 billion devices will be connected to the Internet of Things, creating a digital network of virtually everything. (Business) AI also knows a rapid growth of 33 year-over-year in 2024. And, as another example, it is estimated that 90% of the world's data was generated in the last 2 years.

The exponential growth of mobile devices in the world, people's presence on social media, cloud technologies, and the staggering amounts of data that has been generated, have all transformed the way we live and work. Most companies report that most of their employees use smart devices for everything, from email to project management, to content creation.

While all of these advances have improved our lives and provided us with greater opportunities for innovation than ever before, they have also accelerated the rise of an entirely new problem to contend with unprecedented and crippling complexity.

The world may be getting smarter, but it is not getting any easier.

The digital value network contains the SAP Business Suite at its (digital) core. It interconnects all aspects of the value network in real-time to drive business outcomes. The SAP Business Suite, with the SAP HANA platform as its foundation, gives consumer-product companies the opportunity to re-platform core business processes and bring together business processes with analytics in real time. This enables a smarter, faster, and simpler enterprise, which includes connecting every aspect of internal operations. It also enables real-time processes such as the following:

• Workforce engagement to retain and grow existing talent, attract new talent, and preserve enterprise intelligence with a smarter, engaged workforce.
• Supplier collaboration through business networks to mitigate supply risk, accelerate growth, and help ensure global compliance, all while maximizing product availability and margins.
• The Internet of Things and Big Data, combining internal, external, social, and sensor data to enable real-time visibility to quantifiable measures of consumer demand and other market dynamics with qualitative measures of consumer sentiment, intent, and behavior.

This entire value chain, including the core, is digitized, and serves as the platform for innovation and business process automation. All supported and facilitated by SAP's built-in (business) AI capabilities.

The SAP solutions for CRM and Customer Experience support the customer space, while the supplier space is supported by solutions like Concur, SAP Ariba, and SAP Fieldglass.

For your workforce, you can find here, for example, the SAP Fiori, SAP Fieldglass, and SAP SuccessFactors solutions. Finally, the area of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is covered by the various deployment options of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

SAP S/4HANA is the core Enterprise Resource Planning component of the SAP Business Suite. It is powered by the SAP HANA platform.

SAP S/4HANA runs on SAP HANA and this facilitates and even promotes innovations like, for example, advanced applications, the use of (business) AI, and options for simulating.

SAP S/4HANA is designed using SAP Fiori as its main user interface, offering an integrated user experience with modern usability and instant insight on any device - role-based, mobile-first, consistent experience across all lines of business (LoB).

SAP S/4HANA is connected to the Internet of Things and business networks for real-time collaboration in the networked economy. It is engineered to provide a choice of deployment options (on-premise, cloud, and hybrid). It is also designed for easy adoption.

At the center of SAP S/4HANA Suite is SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management, which was built by simplifying the SAP ERP solution and re-integrating and simplifying portions of the SAP Business Suite products, such as SAP SRM, SAP CRM, and SAP SCM into this core. SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management is available on-premise and in the cloud, with different licensing and subscription models.

The SAP S/4HANA Suite is completed by the integration of dedicated Lines of Business (LoB) and industry solutions into SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management. These solutions can be cloud-based, like SAP SuccessFactors, or delivered on-premise as well, like SAP Transportation Management, depending on market need.

SAP S/4HANA is designed for easy adoption. It includes guided configuration and easy onboarding from the discovery of the solution through cloud trials to deployment with many pre-configured solution processes.

The SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) serves as an open extension agility layer for SAP S/4HANA. The extensions built on the SAP BTP can run in combination with all deployment options of SAP S/4HANA (Cloud and on-premise).

As stated, SAP S/4HANA is available both as an on-premise edition and as in the cloud. This learning journey and course focuses on the SAP S/4HANA on-premise edition, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. The next table explains the main differences between SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.

Technology is disruptive. Driven by the combination of ever-growing digitization and evolving consumer demands, digital transformation is the use of new technologies to drive significant business improvements. This includes capitalizing on new opportunities as well as effectively transforming existing business.

This is an ongoing process, and will also continue influencing the processes described in this learning journey (/course) in the future.