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SeeBUrGer Supply Chain Management (SCM) Monitor for Sap
Achieving Real-Time Supply Chain Visibility with New SAP Best Practices
3SEEBURGER | SCM Monitor for SAP 2 SEEBURGER | SCM Monitor for SAP
Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Wanted: Smoother Business, Better Customer Service, Lower Costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
A New Approach: Centralized Supply Chain Monitoring with SAP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Three New Best-Practice Extensions for SAP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
How SEEBURGER Delivers the New Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Move Up to Centralized Supply Chain Monitoring with SAP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Content
Executive Summary
Identifying and preventing problems in B2B supply chain transactions can challenge even the best, most-established SAP and ERP systems. Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and other supply-chain monitoring tools don’t provide insight into B2B-related communications inside SAP or ERP. Nor does SAP itself, because it can natively monitor only single processes (such as IDOC conversions) – not B2B transactions. This effectively makes SAP a supply-chain dead zone, with SAP users having to call EDI Operations to get answers to the simplest of questions.
As a result, problem identification and resolution takes forever. Responses to customer and partner problems are often too late or – worse – problems go unsolved. Business experiences delays or even outages. Costs escalate. A new approach – centralized supply chain monitoring from within SAP – builds on SAP’s best practices, standards and workflows to fill in the SAP dead zone.
It turns SAP into a global B2B intelligence system, by extending real-time B2B supply chain insight and problem-solving beyond the IT department to your business departments. With new best practices for supply chain monitoring in SAP, problems get identified and solved more efficiently. Business cycles are faster, support costs are lower, and customers and partners are happier.
Wanted: Smoother Business, Better Customer Service, Lower Costs
Good supply chain management depends on effectively connecting the supplier ecosystem with your internal business processes so business can happen faster, at lower costs, and with fewer disconnects. With its standardized processes and best practices (such as the IDOC intermediate document format), SAP helps streamline supply chain management by automating critical, complex business processes like order-to-cash and purchase-to-pay.
But SAP’s efficiency often breaks down when IDOCs and other SAP supply chain data become part of B2B business transactions. Once SAP supply chain data go outside SAP, the data are virtually invisible to the people responsible: supply chain and business professionals. SAP users have no real-time insight into what’s happening. To get answers to simple business questions like “Where is my order?” or “Did my order ship?” SAP users have to contact someone in EDI Operations.
EDI has its own problems. B2B messages can easily get lost as they navigate internal systems, including SAP, JMS, IBM MQ Series, EDI translators, BEA, and Cyclone Interchange. Finding lost transactions is difficult: transaction and log file contents are challenging to analyze, and document content formats are non-intuitive. Many specialists often need to be involved to solve one problem. Meanwhile, SAP users wait – and wait – for answers.
The whole process is terribly inefficient and time-consuming – and disconnected from both B2B transactions and the business. The lack of real-time insight can result in all kinds of business problems, including:
z Business Delays: B2B problem identification and resolution takes far too long. On average, identifying and solving a B2B problem takes 20 hours. The result can be processing delays – or even production outages.
z Higher Operating Costs: Support for B2B integration and managed file transfer is too expensive, because nearly all problems are thrown over the wall to expensive EDI or IT technical resources. When working with technical B2B messages, it’s not unusual for IT technicians or EDI specialists to spend as much as 50% of their time just finding problems. They may rely on a proliferating array of “point” tools for problem resolution.
z Customer Service Problems: B2B problem-solving is reactive, not proactive: your first clue that you have a problem may be a phone call from a key trading partner. You may even be regularly violating partner service level agreements (SLAs) – and not even know it until it’s too late to avoid fines, penalties or lost business.
The problem: Business users can’t see SAP documents once they leave SAP and become part of supply chain transactions. They must rely on EDI Operations staff for help. This can cause business delays, higher operating costs, and customer service problems.
5SEEBURGER | SCM Monitor for SAP 4 SEEBURGER | SCM Monitor for SAP
You’ve established your connections internally and with your trading partners. Now it’s time to turn your attention to managing and acting on the business information flowing through the network. This transaction information is likely mission-critical to your business, whether you have a single connection or thousands of trading partners. The best way to protect and capture the value of this information is centralized supply chain monitoring with SAP. By centralizing and intelligently automating supply chain monitoring within SAP, you can turn SAP into a global B2B business intelligence system capable of tracing transaction processing chains at both the technical and business levels. With this dual competence, you can get control of your data flows, through detailed views of inter-application data transformations.
Specifically, you can:
z Monitor transactions and events in real time to ensure what you expected to occur actually has occurred.
z View transactions in the context of the lifecycle of a business process, such as purchase order to invoice to payment, giving you proactive insight into the health of your business.
z Improve responsiveness to customers and partners by giving support teams and trading partners the tools to diagnose problems without technical research and analysis.
A New Approach: Centralized Supply Chain Monitoring with SAP
Centralized supply chain monitoring with SAP provides a unified, detailed and easily understood view of supply chain transactions for business users and EDI Operations alike. SAP users have easy access to all documents associated with end-to-end business processes and communication. EDI Operations is no longer a bottleneck.
These capabilities translate into three new best-practice extensions to SAP for supply chain management:
z Real-Time Problem Resolution: Centralized monitoring provides a real-time, business-level view of each transaction with the ability to find and react quickly to underlying technical B2B message data. This view is accessible to every authorized user working within the SAP supply chain management system: technical specialists and business users. Business users are no longer out of the loop; they can find and start solving problems within SAP – often without relying on IT or EDI specialists. Benefits: Fewer business process delays and production outages. Better customer service. Faster onboarding of new suppliers. Less drain on IT resources.
z Transparency: Everyone now has complete, up-to-date insight into the transactions as they progress through SAP – from intake to output to follow-on processes. People no longer have to piece the picture together from multiple monitors or fragmented steps, wasting valuable time and compromising data quality. Benefits: Faster response times with full traceability and better accountability.
z Collaboration: With centralized monitoring from within SAP, technical specialists and business users now have a common view of transactions and a common language for solving problems. When necessary, specialists and business users can collaborate, reducing the usual back-and-forth and speeding up the problem resolution process. Benefits: Greater efficiency and faster problem resolution. Better data quality with fewer errors. Lower costs.
Three New Best-Practice Extensions for SAP
Centralized supply chain monitoring with SAP introduces three new best practices into SAP: real-time problem resolution, transparency, and collaboration.
7SEEBURGER | SCM Monitor for SAP 6 SEEBURGER | SCM Monitor for SAP
To help SAP customers deploy centralized supply chain monitoring, SEEBURGER has developed a packaged solution: SEEBURGER B2B/SCM Monitor for SAP. SEEBURGER B2B/SCM Monitor for SAP is 100 % inte-grated with SAP (delivered as an add-on). It also in-tegrates easily with popular B2B integration servers, including SAP PI (via the SEEBURGER EDI Adapter) or SEEBURGER Business Integration Server (BIS).
The SEEBURGER B2B/SCM Monitor provides secure centralized monitoring and control of all supply chain transaction messages, on both the incoming and out-going sides. It provides centralized access to all SAP documents, transactions and functions, with an intu-itive user interface for business and technical users.
Running inside SAP, the monitor displays clear, dyna-mically structured data about each process in a sing-le monitor that runs side-by-side with the typical SAP screen. Business users, IT technicians, and EDI spe-cialists see real-time status information in an easy-to-understand format. Think of it as a continuous health check for your supply chain processes in SAP.
Using SEEBURGER B2B/SCM Monitor for SAP, business users can:
z Quickly search for content, technical communcation, or transmission errors
z Customize their searches using dynamic views, selection options, and customization features
z Set up automated message monitoring with alerts, using our workflow-controlled process monitoring and escalation management function
z Navigate to SAP master data, documents, and process transactions for more detail or access process-specific functions, such as tolerance checks, with single clicks
z Display or print readable PDF versions of any document
z Produce reports
How SEEBURGER Delivers the New Approach
The SEEBURGER B2B/SCM Monitor for SAP is 100 % integrated with SAP and delivered as an add-on, for rapid deployment. It integrates with popular B2B integration servers, including SEEBURGER BIS. The monitor provides end-to-end insight into B2B transactions from inside SAP and smooths the flow of documents from external trading partners into SAP and beyond.
also easily customize it for your SAP system, including the selection screen (single point of entry), tree control, and navigation controls. You can expand the monitor to include additional process-specific functions, such as ORDERS, INVOICE, syntax check, quantity/price deviation, and determination of organization data.
Tracing supply chain documents and fixing problems is much faster and neater with the SEEBURGER B2B/SCM Monitor. Here, the monitor lets an authorized business user search for and isolate a problem spot in the SAP Sales & Distribution (SD) application, then drill down into the original documents and master data to make changes.
Centralized supply chain monitoring with SAP closes a big productivity gap in your SAP supply chain management processes. By centralizing and simplifying insight into B2B communications messages, you can get to the bottom of supply-chain transaction problems faster, onboard new suppliers faster, and reduce customer-service problems.SEEBURGER can help you move up to centralized B2B/SCM monitoring quickly and efficiently, lowering the cost and improving the effectiveness of supply chain management. Our packaged solution complements your SAP workflows and enforces your SAP standards. It brings three vital new best practices to supply chain management – real-time problem resolution, transparency, and collaboration – without changing your SAP processes. More than 8,800 companies worldwide have turned to SEEBURGER for help with their business integration needs. As a long-time SAP partner, we’ve helped more than 2,000 SAP customers create secure B2B and file-transfer connections to their internal applications and external trading partners.
SAP administrators can control access to monitoring functions using extended role and authorization func-tions, for governance and auditing.
The SEEBURGER B2B/SCM Monitor for SAP is pre-con-figured and ready to run on your SAP system. You can
Move Up to Centralized Supply Chain Monitoring with SAP
Business Benefits of SEEBURGER B2B/SCM Monitor for SAP
Transparency, traceability and
accountability across the supply chain
Improves customer service overall
Accelerates deliveries and shipments
Reduces time to revenue
Reduces fines/penalties from
service-level violations
Reduces operating costs
Easy to install, reducing deployment
time and TCO
Easy to learn and use – no training
or change to your SAP processes
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All product names mentioned are the property of the respective company. SEEBURGER SCM for SAP White Paper 5/2012 · © SEEBURGER AG 07/2012 SEEBURGER Inc. · 1230 Peachtree Street NE, Suite 1020 Atlanta, GA 30309 USA · [email protected] · www.seeburger.com
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