Container Availability and Cost Optimization as part of IBP
Integrated Business Planning is a hard act. It is marketed as a planning solution that enables planning use cases across time horizons and across stakeholder groups in a single planning model. Easier said than done, right? In reality, planning procurement, manufacturing, and transportation in a single model is hard, really hard. Sure, we can model a rough cut planning process across all the activities, but devil remains firmly entrenched in the details. As S&OP becomes more and more irrelevant in this turbulent world, the need to model operational details across all functions in a single planning model is becoming the litmus test for integrated business planning solution effectiveness.
I recently came across a customer requirement to plan containers for a Plastic manufacturer. They want to not only forecast demand and plan production, but also understand the number of containers needed at a given site in a given week to ensure plants can keep shipping what they produce. This can get tricky in current times with containers availability increasingly constrained. Given the customer has multiple ocean freight providers with varying availability of containers, they need to search for container availability in the right priority order, and be able to model containers as a constrained resource in their supply planning process. Containers requirements plan then needs to be communicated to the ocean freight providers for their commit to the request. Plans need to get published to execution systems to generate the right freight orders in an integrated process very similar to response management processes interacting with detailed production scheduling processes.
GitaCloud team came up with a creative approach to model ocean freight providers as modes of transport and containers as transportation resources with finite capacity in the SAP Integrated Business Planning model. We architected an overall solution approach to then take the resulting Transportation Plan to SAP Transportation Resources Planning (SAP TRP) to carry out Container Scheduling. SAP TRP is an add-on to SAP Transportation Management that can then turn the detailed container schedule into the corresponding freight orders in an integrated process across SAP TM and SAP S/4HANA. SAP TRP shines in its ability to optimize the container traffic across the logistics network to minimize empty container movement and hence the overall transportation cost. It also enables what-if simulation with an option to change plans based on shifting priorities or availability or costs.
Are you struggling with a similar use case where a finite resource needs to be modeled more granular than the overall Rough Cut Capacity Checking approach that S&OP is designed to deliver? Would be interesting to collaborate on similar creative approaches across SAP or non-SAP solutions to deliver a solution approach that can produce optimal solutions at the scale and speed needed. You can reach out to connect@gitacloud.com.
