Supply Chain and Manufacturing innovations in SAP S/4HANA 1709

The 1610 release of SAP S/4HANA brought advanced supply chain and manufacturing functionality such as production planning and detailed scheduling, advanced available to promise, and extended warehouse management directly into core ERP. This eliminated functional boundaries and allowed businesses to orchestrate end-to-end supply chain and manufacturing processes to better respond to customers’ demand for personalized products.

SAP S/4HANA 1709 continues the supply chain conversion path of the prior release by integrating the SAP Transportation Management application into the core, delivering the industry’s first truly converged supply chain and manufacturing ERP solution from planning and forecasting all the way to downstream production, execution, and transportation. In addition, logistics professionals can now take advantage of a new transportation cockpit as well as load consolidation, planning and optimization, automated carrier selection, and more. This reduces IT landscape complexity while simultaneously providing best-of-breed transportation tools to make your operations more efficient and effective. Plus SAP S/4HANA 1709 extends embedded analytics capabilities to cover transportation management.

SAP S/4HANA 1709 also allows you to leverage demand-driven material requirements planning in your supply chain and manufacturing environment. Now you can provide real-time prioritization of supply orders, dampen variability with strategic buffering, and shorten lead times.  This allows you to reduce cost with lower overall stock while ensuring high customer service levels. This new material requirements planning concept provides full demand transparency, decision support, instant insight, and immediate resolution based on lead time and consumption analytics.

Here are other notable supply chain and manufacturing innovations in SAP S/4HANA 1709:

• In warehouse management: integration of quality management processes and management for unplanned returns.
• In supplier relationship management: a new centralized purchase hub for consolidated purchase requisitions
• In manufacturing engineering: conversion of an engineering bill of materials (BOM) into a manufacturing BOM, 3D visual support for BOM items, and animated work instructions 
• In manufacturing for complex assembly: enhanced comprehensive planning environment, change impact analysis, and system-based shop-floor monitoring with automatic issue detection
• In extended production operations: enhanced monitor production orders and operations, root cause analysis and decision support for shop-floor operation issues, management of work queues and adjustments to existing production orders, and tracking and tracing of individual parts