Today in an IT Steering Committee meeting, we agreed to proceed with the Fusion Ops Supply Chain solution. This represents a significant change in our IT Strategy. I also announced that we plan to utilize MS SharePoint to supplement our implementation of SAP Enterprise Portals which also represents a significant change to our IT Strategy.
Three years ago we implemented the mySAP Business suite. We had already implemented SAP R/3 v 4.7. With this mySAP Business suite implementation, we added BW, APO, ICH, EP, and XI.
Before that, we had several applications that were patched together and to R/3 which became a nightmare to maintain. We were spending a significant amount of time maintaining the system connections and trying to keep the data in each system in sync. We had a supplier portal from RiverOne that was constantly out of sync with SAP - partly due to our buiness processes and partly due to complexity in the solution. Any time we needed a change in the supplier portal, we had to arrange the change with the vendor and pay extra for it. We were looking for a solution where data integrity was not an issue and where we were at liberty to make changes in house whenever the business required the changes. The SAP Netweaver platform was the perfect solution.
Over the past three years, however, we learned a lot of lessons. One is that even when we had extremely good data from our R/3 and APO systems, which allowed us to get reports showing exactly where our supply gaps were, it was not enough. Just having the data was not enough to change the habits of our material planners.
We also received complaints from our suppliers about the speed of our portal. We have exposed our instance of EP externally. The suppliers log into EP and via single sign-on, they can access supplier specific BW reports and they can commit to POs via ICH v4.1 (SAP's Inventory Collaboration Hub). They can also commit to their forcast via a custom EP application using BW data to recommend the forecast commit.
Today's decision to use Fusion Ops represents a change in our IT Strategy, because we are entering into a scenario where not all of our applications are SAP applications anymore. It's not too much of a stretch because Fusion Ops is a Powered by Netweaver product. As it runs on the Netweaver platform, we should not have many connection problems, however, it does run on a separate SQL database and therefore has the potential to get out of sync with R/3.
I have become disallusioned by all supplier portals. They are a nightmare for IT organizations to maintain. I think we should undertake a major suppier B2B initiative where we can communicate via EDI, XML or Rosetttanet PIPs. Our customer EDI programs are very solid and it is extremely rare for us to have support issues with EDI.
Inevitably I think we will have to offer suppliers both a portals solution and an EDI solution. I beleive that supplier don't want to have to log on to their customer's portals to commit to POs after they already had to do the same thing in their own ERP systems. They end up having to log into several customer's portals and learn how to use all of them. I think that is why suppliers would rather commit in thier own ERP systems and have those signals automatically sent to our ERP system.
The Fusion Ops solution, however is more than just another supplier portal. It is a rules-based engine that can act on MRP results on behalf of the material planners. Our MRP produces thousands of requisitions, some are no-brainers that should either be cancelled or converted to a PO. Today the material planners have to run reports to determine where the real gaps are and then act on those gaps. Fusion Ops could automatically take care of most of the MRP requirements based on rules that the Material team maintains. Fusion Ops then sends the POs to their supplier portal for suppliers to commit. That is the piece that I would like to handle via EDI.
Later I will explain why the addition of SharePoint represents a new strategy for us as well.
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