"The technical/cost advantages of SAP became more evident as we investigated all areas of an ERP system…SAP became the obvious choice and was selected along with Caarma."
Director, Financial Information Systems Applications
Case Study I - Semiconductor equipment
The Organization:
Our client designs, manufactures and markets semiconductor wafer processing equipment used in the fabrication of integrated circuits.
Challenges and Opportunities:
• Our client currently plans spare parts using a highly manual off-line system involving multiple spreadsheets.
• Current process has no inherent linkages to system bills of material and ECO controls.
• Approximating demand forecast through Safety-stock settings in the SAP ECC system.
• New Product Introductions and First-Product-in-Region situations not supported strongly within the existing process.
• Multiple shipments across long distances results in increased freight expense and adds to replenishment lead-times.
• Provide historical data as the critical input to generate the statistical forecast.
• Enable collaboration between planners and their business partners.
Objectives
• Implement Demand Planning, Supply Network Planning, Business Warehouse to model the supply chain planning process for the client Spares
• Implement an automated forecasting and planning solution
• Improve Spares Service Level support for its customers
• Maintain Safety Stock levels to minimize stock-out situations and help maintain overall service levels.
• Implement Advanced Safety Stock Planning methods in SAP using Beta Service Levels
• Reduce Inventory investment and obsolescence risks through improved forecasting, planning and order processing.
• Manage New Product Introductions and First-product-in Region situations.
• Manage Replenishment for different combinations of source-destination locations.
• Enable reporting from the planning system to meet a variety of metrics and operational information.
The Benefits
• Available data in SAP will be compiled and formatted for automatic weekly updates to the APO planning system.
• Rationalize usage history so that demand is forecasted in the location from which a given customer should be ideally supported, rather than the location from which it was historically provided.
• Ability to incorporate the most current demand history and Install base data to update forecast of spares demand using responsive forecasting.
• Customer-specific forecasting will provide a further increase in the level of service support the client supplies to those customers.
• Forecast customer consignment demand directly in the planning system, removing the need to maintain offline stocking lists for consignment locations.
• Support responsive replenishment of specific consignment locations to support client contractual obligations for such locations.
• Reduces transactional overhead through automation of supply planning tasks.
• Maximizes effective service level provided to the end Customer.
