CHALLENGE FORUM PARTICIPANTS
In today's fast changing business environment, organizations are facing unprecedented levels of demand volatility across their operations. Fluctuations in customer demand, supply shortages, logistics delays, geopolitical shifts and other disruptions are creating ripple effects across supply chains and posing major challenges for enterprises seeking visibility into these impacts.
Many organizations attempt to leverage their ERP systems to assess and respond to these disruptions. However, disjointed legacy systems and fragmented data often limit real time visibility into how demand fluctuations will affect key metrics around capacity, costs, service levels and profitability.
This lack of end to end visibility constrains proactive mitigation and optimization of business outcomes during turbulent times.
To explore innovative ways of addressing this challenge, TechPros.io recently convened a Challenge Forum roundtable of senior supply chain leaders and technical experts. The participants engaged in an insightful dialogue around bridging the visibility gap and leveraging ERP to better manage demand volatility.
🎙️ Listen to the full interview in the Enterprise Thought Leadership podcast, powered by TechPros.io
In today's fast changing business environment, organizations are facing unprecedented levels of demand volatility across their operations. Fluctuations in customer demand, supply shortages, logistics delays, geopolitical shifts and other disruptions are creating ripple effects across supply chains and posing major challenges for enterprises seeking visibility into these impacts.
Many organizations attempt to leverage their ERP systems to assess and respond to these disruptions. However, disjointed legacy systems and fragmented data often limit real time visibility into how demand fluctuations will affect key metrics around capacity, costs, service levels and profitability. This lack of end to end visibility constrains proactive mitigation and optimization of business outcomes during turbulent times.
To explore innovative ways of addressing this challenge, TechPros.io recently convened a Challenge Forum roundtable of senior supply chain leaders and technical experts. The participants engaged in an insightful dialogue around bridging the visibility gap and leveraging ERP to better manage demand volatility.
CHALLENGE FORUM PARTICIPANTS
Claudia Richter, who leads global Sales, Inventory and Operations Planning at Hottinger Brüel & Kjær, expanded on the lack of cross functional visibility as a roadblock.
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Often, you have different teams controlling different routes to market with their own KPIs. The question is how to build a framework to keep everything consistent, on the same logical journey.
Following the roundtable dialogue, the expert participants were interviewed to outline potential solutions they would propose for bridging the ERP visibility gap. Their perspectives highlighted innovative ways organizations can start assessing and mitigating demand volatility impacts through enhanced integration, modeling and analytics capabilities.
Integrated modeling and simulation
Claudia Richter recommends implementing a digital platform that integrates data across ERP, CRM and other systems.
“This enables modeling the operational and financial impacts of supply chain disruptions before they occur,” she explained.
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With flexible simulation capabilities, we can visually map out our supply network, overlay a disruption like a supplier outage, and quantify the cascading effects on production, inventory, logistics and P&L impact.
This integrated simulation provides the end to end visibility – from supply disruption to financial statements – that is often lacking today. Interactive dashboards tailored for different user groups also ensure insights are actionable by stakeholders across the business.
Claudia suggests starting with a narrow proof of concept focused on a high-value use case. “Implementing a minimally viable product within 12 -16 weeks helps demonstrate fast time to value while still transforming supply chain capabilities at pace,” she said.
Digital twin modeling
Jon Greenwood, an expert in ERP integration and manufacturing solutions, advocates building digital twin models that connect data from ERP, CRM, manufacturing systems and more.
"These digital twins enable much more granular assessment of business impacts than ERP alone can provide,” he stated. “These maufacturing models provide many degrees of freedom to experiment with what/if scenarios by adjusting levers – like production schedules, resource configurations / performance or inventory levels – and immediately see how outcomes change, while the same models monitor manufacturing in real time to detect anomalies and predict outcomes."
This approach can drive transformation and collaboration across all business functions, Greenwood explained.
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Teams can run scenarios and use embedded AI to guide them towards optimal solutions across metrics. It’s no longer siloed analysis.
He notes that changes to business processes are often needed to feed the right live data into the models from source systems. This level of granularity is key. “ERP captures costs at a very high level. Pushing those down to individual products in the digital twin highlights small impacts that add up.”
Leveraging supply chain analytics
Prasenjit Sengupta, a SAP practice leader, suggests tapping new solutions to enhance visibility, such as IBP for demand sensing and Supply Chain Control Tower.
“IBP can look out 12 months to detect fluctuations, enabling supply chain alignment across sales, manufacturing, distribution and service,” he said. “And Control Tower provides visual, rapid insights into operational data flows so actions can be taken quickly.”
For the ERP foundation, Sengupta recommends SAP S/4HANA and best practice templates to balance standardization with customization.
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This combination of ERP, supply chain analytics, and business process improvements will enable organizations to become more agile in sensing and responding to demand changes.
Profitability modeling
Domas Voroneckas, a solution architect highlights SAP’s company’s Profitability and Performance Management (PPM) module as a valuable tool.
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PPM integrates well with S/4HANA and builds detailed profitability models pulling data from ERP. You can then conduct what if scenario modeling to forecast outcomes based on demand, costs, pricing and other changes.
The in memory architecture of SAP HANA makes these complex simulations extremely fast, Voroneckas noted. “You can iterate through different scenarios rapidly to fully understand contingencies and optimize profitability levers.”
He emphasizes that data quality and integration are critical enablers for PPM success. “Garbage in, garbage out still applies - inaccurate data will lead to flawed results, no matter how sophisticated the models.”
Final perspectives
Emily Tippins, CMO of Avantra, provided additional insights on how their AIOps platform can help organizations achieve end-to-end visibility and automated management of SAP landscapes.
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The solutions highlighted offer ways to improve insights, but often don't interconnect the range of IT systems underpinning SAP," she explained. "You need highly adaptive platforms to monitor and remediate issues across fragmented technology stacks before small problems cascade into major business impacts."
Tippins believes Avantra’s integration capabilities with specific focus on SAP technologies enable smarter automations than generic tools. "We observe the full stack across infrastructure, databases, networks and applications to rapidly pinpoint root causes across software portfolios," she said.
She highlighted that Avantra helps supply chain leaders confidently plan and respond to disruptions without worrying about underlying systems stability.
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The platform works 24/7 to match production environments, providing complete visibility to guide decisions and trigger smart notifications that mitigate risk.
A great forum to remind us that we're not alone. Senior marketing leaders are facing the same challenges, just in a slightly different shape. The Challenge Forum is a proactive way to share and learn how others are dealing with these universal issues.
Emily Tippins
CMO, Avantra
It's not often that as a busy marketer, that you get a chance to spend some high-quality time in the company of peers and go meaningfully deep into a real marketing challenge. The Challenge Forum is both interesting and challenging, and I would recommend it.
Dave Hughes
Head of Marketing, Ideal