Analyzing Intelligent Visibility in SAP Supply Chain Control Tower

As you progress through this lesson it's important to concentrate on several key topics that are crucial for mastering the content. These areas of focus are not just topics to be learned—they are your stepping stones to a deeper understanding and successful achievement of the course's learning objectives. By emphasizing these crucial areas, you will develop a robust knowledge base that will enhance your proficiency and effectiveness in supply chain management.

Intelligent Visibility: A feature within the SAP Supply Chain Control Tower that provides enhanced transparency and insights into supply chain operations, by visualizing and analyzing real-time information from multiple sources.

Customization Features: The ability within Intelligent Visibility to tailor dashboards, views, and reports to focus on specific parameters, regions, products, or time frames, according to the user's needs.

Collaboration Enhancement: The role of Intelligent Visibility in supporting informed discussions among teams by providing a shared, accurate view of data, ensuring alignment and operational efficiency across departments.

Procedure Playbooks: A tool within the Intelligent Visibility app that defines standardized procedures for resolving supply chain planning issues, including an overview of the issues, reasons, and actionable steps.

Geographic Mapping: The ability to view customers, supply chain networks, and key figures on a geographic map, enhancing the understanding of spatial relationships and impacts on the supply chain.

Product Visualization: Integrating SAP Enterprise Product Development to view product network dependencies, manage exceptions, and provide visibility into order execution within the supply chain.

Transportation Management Visibility: Using alert resolution recommendations, map content integration, and summary of alerts to enhance management of transportation aspects within the supply chain.

In today's business environment, managing the supply chain has become increasingly complex. Consequently, companies are turning to sophisticated tools like SAP Supply Chain Control Tower for help. One of the most significant features of SAP Supply Chain Control Tower is its Intelligent Visibility functionality. This lesson aims to explain this functionality and its importance to beginners delving into supply chain procedures.

Intelligent Visibility is a unique feature in SAP Supply Chain Control Tower that provides enhanced transparency and insights into supply chain operations. In a nutshell, it is a function that helps visualize and analyze real-time information from multiple sources, facilitating informed decision-making.

A key component of Intelligent Visibility is its ability to gather and consolidate data from different sources within an organization. Whether it's sales trends, inventory levels, or demand forecasts, Intelligent Visibility collects data from these disparate sources and presents it in a single, unified view. This offers a comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date overview of the supply chain situation.

Intelligent Visibility stands out for its predictive capabilities. It uses advanced algorithms to analyze current and historical data and make predictions about future outcomes. For example, it may forecast potential inventory shortages before they occur, allowing users to address the issue before it becomes a problem.

Moreover, Intelligent Visibility offers customization features enabling users to choose what data they wish to view and focus on, depending on their unique needs. Users can customize dashboards, views, and reports to focus on specific parameters, regions, products, or time frames.

A crucial aspect of Intelligent Visibility is its role in enhancing collaboration. By providing a shared, accurate view of data, it supports more informed discussions among teams. Shared access to accurate, real-time information can enhance communication, lead to better alignment across different teams and departments, and ensure everyone operates from a single source of truth.

In conclusion, the Intelligent Visibility functionality in SAP Supply Chain Control Tower is a game-changing tool for those diving into supply chain management. As a beginner, learning to leverage this functionality can profoundly impact how you comprehend and manage your supply chain operations. It offers a consolidated view of your data, predictive capabilities, and aids in enhancing collaboration. These valuable insights could be the difference between reactive problem-solving and proactive, strategic decision making - setting you off to a strong start in mastering supply chain processes.

Video Summary

Discover how the Intelligent Visibility app within the SAP Supply Chain Control Tower provides comprehensive real-time visibility and standardized responses to supply chain challenges.

Intelligent visibility is an app that can be used to view and monitor internal and external supply chain processes and exceptions on a geographic map or in a table.

The Intelligent Visibility app captures and uses data from different sources to provide real-time visibility. The app allows business users to react quickly and to make decisions to solve supply chain issues.

With this app you can view custom alerts, view custom alerts details, and navigate to other apps or external S4/HANA systems.

Playbooks

You can use this new app to define standardized procedures for solving supply chain planning issues and share them with other users or user groups. A procedure playbook can provide an overview of the issues that it helps resolve, the reasons for the issues, and the activities and actions that can be taken to resolve them. When an issue is detected, for example, in a custom alert, users with whom a procedure playbook has been shared can use the playbook while trying to resolve the issue.

You can create a procedure playbook in the Procedure Playbooks app. You create it for a planning area, and an app area, where it can be used, for example, custom alerts. You can include a detailed description and overview of the issues that the procedure playbook helps resolve and the possible reasons for the issues. You can also define activities and actions that can be taken to resolve the issues. You share a procedure playbook with other users or user groups.

When you create, copy, or edit a custom alert definition in the Define and Subscribe to Custom Alerts app, you can now add one or more procedure playbooks to your definition in a new step of the wizard. You can add procedure playbooks to your custom alert definition only if you created them or if they have been shared with you in the Procedure Playbooks app. In addition, the planning area of a procedure playbook must be the same as the planning area of a custom alert definition.

When a custom alert is calculated and displays in the Monitor Custom Alerts or Intelligent Visibility app, users with whom the procedure playbook has been shared can view it along with the alert and use it while trying to resolve the issue.

Multiple enhancements have been made to procedure playbooks that provide you with more insight into their usage and usefulness and allow you to manage them better.

You can now:

• View product network dependencies with where-used/where-made filtering
• Manage Exceptions using attribute specific alert rules

You can now:

• Map content integration with SAP HANA Spatial Services
• Manage Exceptions using attribute specific alert rules
• Display orders and details independent of alerts
• Share changes of alerts and procedure playbooks

You can now:

• Use alert resolution recommendations with procedure playbooks
• Map content integration from external provider ESRI
• Use summary of alerts and selected products and locations

You can now:

• Use statistics and user ratings for procedure playbooks
• Manage alert notifications with user level controls

Reflect on a situation from your professional or personal life where a lack of visibility and predictive insight led to a challenge or missed opportunity. How might the application of Intelligent Visibility, as described in the SAP Supply Chain Control Tower, have altered the outcome? Consider the aspects of real-time data analysis, predictive capabilities, and enhanced collaboration. How would these features have empowered you to make more informed decisions and possibly prevent the issue or capitalize on the opportunity?

Pause here for a moment and take some time to jot down your thoughts on the personal reflection question. Once you've recorded your response, you'll have the opportunity to compare it with an answer from an expert in SAP Supply Chain. This exercise will give you insight into your understanding and how it aligns with professional perspectives.

In my previous role as a supply chain manager, we faced a significant challenge when unexpected demand spikes for several products led to stockouts, disappointing customers and impacting our sales. This situation stemmed from a lack of real-time visibility into our inventory levels and a failure to predict changing market demands accurately.

Had we applied the principles of Intelligent Visibility, as found in the SAP Supply Chain Control Tower, the scenario could have unfolded differently. The real-time data analysis capability would have provided an up-to-the-minute view of our inventory across all warehouses. This visibility would have enabled us to detect diminishing stock levels early, well before reaching a critical low.

In addition, the enhanced collaboration feature would have facilitated better communication between our sales, production, and logistics teams. With everyone operating from a single source of truth and being alerted to potential issues in real-time, we could have coordinated a more agile response, aligning our efforts to address the forecasted demand.

Reflecting on this, it's clear that leveraging Intelligent Visibility could have empowered us to prevent the stockouts, maintain customer satisfaction, and seize the sales opportunity. This experience highlights the importance of integrating sophisticated supply chain management tools into our operations, enabling us to be more proactive, responsive, and informed in our decision-making processes.

The following scenario presents a real-life situation that often arises in the world of supply chain management. So, it's time to put your knowledge to the test! Put on your thinking cap and tackle the questions below. After you've responded, take a moment to compare your answers with those of an SAP Supply Chain Expert. Are you ready? Let's go!

Imagine you are a supply chain analyst at a company that has just implemented the SAP Supply Chain Control Tower, with a focus on leveraging its Intelligent Visibility functionality. Your company is about to launch a new product line, but there are concerns about potential supply chain disruptions due to volatile market demands and uncertain supply availability. Using Intelligent Visibility, outline a strategy to:

1. Monitor real-time data for demand forecasts and supply availability.

2. Customize dashboards for different stakeholders (production, logistics, and sales teams).

3. Enhance collaboration across departments to ensure a unified response to any identified challenges.

Your goal should be to provide specific actions you would take for each step to ensure a successful product launch.

Learn how to utilize the intelligent visibility functionality in the SAP Supply Chain Control Tower for a smooth product launch. Discover the steps to monitor real-time data, customize dashboards, and enhance collaboration.

Intelligent Visibility Overview: A feature of the SAP Supply Chain Control Tower that enhances supply chain transparency and facilitates informed decision-making through the visualization and analysis of real-time data.

Data Consolidation: Intelligent Visibility gathers and presents data from various sources within an organization, such as sales trends, inventory levels, and demand forecasts, in a unified view.

Customization Features: Offers customization options for dashboards, views, and reports, enabling users to tailor information displays to their specific needs and focus areas.

Enhanced Collaboration: By providing a shared and accurate data view, Intelligent Visibility fosters improved communication and collaboration among teams, ensuring alignment and efficient operation.

Procedure Playbooks: Facilitates the creation of standardized procedures for solving supply chain planning issues, enhancing the ability to respond quickly and effectively to challenges.

Geographic Mapping and Visualization: Features the ability to view customers, supply chain networks, and key figures on geographic maps, enhancing spatial understanding and decision-making.

Product and Transportation Management: Integrates with SAP Enterprise Product Development and SAP Logistics Business Network for detailed product visualization, order execution visibility, and transportation management, enriched with map content integration and alert-specific rules.

Performance Impact KPIs: Introduces metrics and user ratings for procedure playbooks, along with user-level controls for managing alert notifications, supporting a performance-oriented approach to supply chain management.