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Increase supply chain visibility with SAP Event Management By Sandeep Pradhan
Visibility allows companies to track their products and business processes in a supply chain, building operational excellence. The goal of supply chain visibility is to improve and strengthen the supply chain by providing critical information in the form of business events readily available to all internal and external business partners. Lately, the concept of supply chain event management is proving to be vital in a collaborative business environment, where it goes beyond status visibility to actually providing the ability to respond to critical events with proactive business action.
Supply chain event management Supply chain events carry with them documentation (increasingly electronic) that enable systems to be developed to capture and respond to their occurrence in the supply chain. It is the establishment and documentation of these recordable supply chain events, and deployment of technology tools to monitor and report on these events, that constitute and create a supply chain event management system. The goal of supply chain event management is to improve supply chain effectiveness and reduce supply chain costs by managing events. This goal is achieved by reducing the variations in the supply chain and the number of surprises by changing unplanned events into planned events. This is accomplished by proactive notifications to supply chain managers when specific events occur (for example, inventories are depleted, shipments delayed), allowing managers to respond in a way that ensures >> www.insidesap.com.au
customer satisfaction by putting in place corrective action plans for remedy. Companies that have deployed supply chain event management systems can expect to achieve operational and economic benefits by delivering high customer satisfaction and reducing internal supply chain management costs. These cost reductions can be achieved through lower inventory levels, lower manufacturing costs, economical transportation costs and reduced labor costs. The areas where the concept has yielded high benefits are balancing of supply and demand, supporting product launches, monitoring large number of products or markets and tracking of key supply chain performance indicators.
supply chain visibility can be broken into three core areas of visibility: process, product and performance. •
Process visibility monitors the lifecycle status of business process from an end-to-end perspective. Examples would be monitoring the purchasing process, order fulfillment or transportation processes.
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Product visibility revolves around output of product (that is, stock items, physical assets, and inventory). This visibility is not only at the aggregated global level but also at the granular level (for example, individual equipment levels).
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Performance visibility empowers business users to know more about their business process performance by highlighting the critical path and also gives them the ability to track the physical assets movement in supply chain.
SAP Event Management With SAP Event Management, an application within the SAP SCM Business Suite, SAP not only supports the supply chain event management concept but also provides preconfigured visibility scenarios that customers can leverage for their own implementations. SAP Event Management provides near real-time visibility into the supply chain at a granular level, based on expected events and/or exceptions via web status portal, overdue lists, alert framework, workflows and analytics to identify business priorities, escalation paths and guidance in resolving variations. This functionality ensures that the right information is available for the right product at the right time and place to the right person, allowing effective decision-making and efficient running of business processes. With SAP Event Management, the
SAP Event Management components SAP Event Management has four main components which serve as an engine for management and monitoring of business events: •
Event Processor: Receives incoming messages with one or several supply chain events, logs and validates events, decodes data using mapping definitions and correlates the message with active event handlers (lists all expected and unexpected events).
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Event Controller: Creates changes, activates and deactivates event