Blumohr Uwe - Variant Configuration with SAP

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Blumhr, Uwe.
[Variantenkonfiguration mit SAP. English]
Variant configuration with sap / Uwe Blumhr, Manfred Mnch, and Marin
Ukalovic.2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59229-400-8
ISBN-10: 1-59229-400-6
1. Computer integrated manufacturing systems. 2. Configuration
management. 3. Product management. 4. SAP ERP. I. Mnch, Manfred, 1971
II. Ukalovic, Marin. III. Title.
TS155.63.B5713 2012
670.427dc23
2011028932

ISBN 978-1-59229-400-8 (print)
ISBN 978-1-59229-793-1 (e-book)
ISBN 978-1-59229-794-8 (print and e-book)

2012 by Galileo Press Inc., Boston (MA)
2nd, updated and revised edition 2012

At first glance, Variant Configuration in SAP seems to be a purely technical topic for experts, and this is correct because it requires knowledge from IT areas, such as artificial intelligence, conceptual modeling, and semantic services. But this topic goes far beyond the narrow area of IT. It equally involves areas such as supply chain management (SCM), product lifecycle management, and customer relationship management (CRM), and can therefore be processed only in a multidisciplinary fashion. Computer scientists, engineers, and business economists working for SAP and SAP customers have jointly faced the challenge of variant configuration for more than 15 years. This intensive and continuous collaboration has an enterprise-strategic purpose that concerns both large international enterprises and medium-sized companies: Customer and production processes with configuration variants have become the core process of high-tech enterprises, whether at leading computer manufacturers such as IBM and HP, at automobile manufacturers such as BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen, or at medium-sized furniture manufacturers such as the Hls Group of companies. Today, the variant configuration process is critical to businesses almost everywhere: in plant construction, mechanical engineering, and small and medium-sized businesses, as is discussed in this book.

Here, as in many other areas, the offer for individual customer requirements exceeds the options for classic product description on material coding and bills of materials and corresponding storage on an article basis. The variety of variants is so high that totally new options for product presentation and specification had to be found with which to approach customers. Today, it seems that virtually everyone has already used a configurator on the Internetfor instance, to configure a car to ones personal preferenceseither only for information or for a real purchase decision. These configurators present the providers wide range of options such that customer-specific interaction, brand positioning, and pricing are combined in an intelligent product presentation. Such variant configurators can be found on the Internet; they are also available on laptops for mobile field service and embedded in CAD tools.

Of course, this option was still a long way off in 1994, when SAP developed the first specification and implementation of the SAP Sales Configuration Engine in cooperation with an American customer at an early stage of the SAP R/3 system. Back then, the Internet was only beginning to loom on the horizon; SCM and CRM were terms still to be defined. At that time, however, it was already clear that a business solution for product configuration involved more than just a sales configurator. The new configurator needed to provide two capabilities from the outset: It had to provide SAP customers with a high degree of freedom in user interface design for mobile sales processes, and it had to be integrated with processes of SAP Enterprise Resource Planning; that is, sales order management, materials management, and production. For SAP, as a manufacturer of standard software, this double requirement of free designability and deep integration posed a major challenge.

Today, in times of service-oriented architecture, clearly defined component services, and multichannel-multidevice processes, younger colleagues would probably hardly understand where the actual problems were. But even today the challenges go far deeper than might seem to be the case. Because the variant problem starts with sales configuration in sales and distribution and then continues throughout the entire value-added process, everyone agrees that in sales and distribution, nothing should be promised that cannot be provided in production later on. If a customer selects a certain specification from a myriad of possible combinations of options and receives a quotation for this configuration, it must be ensured that the customer will obtain this configuration exactly as promised. Each customer configuration is a specific variant selected from millions of different possible variants. From the business and logistics viewpoint, it is clear that the variant richness cannot be stockpiled. However, satisfying each sales order individually and independently of other orders through make-to-order production is possible only to a limited extent. From a business perspective, the goal is to link the profitability and scalability of mass production with an optimal degree of customer individualization. This problem poses a true challenge. Brilliant enterprises have advanced solutions to this problem to create a high customer value and to increase their own profitability at the same time.

For a scaling, customer-specific production, you must ensure that all essential restrictions of feasibility in production have already been considered in the sales process. For parts provisioning in requirements planning and in production, you must supply exactly those components that correspond to the specification of the sales order. A missing or wrong part can bring the entire production to a stop or at least result in expensive standstills.

So the configuration knowledge must be passed from the sales order up to production, and must be considered particularly for the bill of materials explosion in requirements planning and material flow according to customer requirements. Here, production planning and control must handle large numbers of very different customer variants in a manageable combination of standard processes and individual tasks. This is a problem of complexity management that can be solved through the close cooperation of all experts involved in the process. Without IT, such processes cannot be mastered in large scopes.

However, classic IT is not enough here. It increasingly involves the question of which language the different expert areas can use to communicate with one another, that is, the engineers in construction and production on the one hand and the employees in sales and distribution and marketing on the other hand. How can the enterprise as a whole present itself to the customer and speak the language of the customer at the same time? The customer searches for a solution to a requirement that he describes in his language. A translation must be provided here: from the language of the customer and his problem into the language of the solution partner and his internal processes and services. The world of customer requirements is dynamic, so how can you determine future requirements and meet them tomorrow by providing a technical implementation? How can you pursue technical innovations that ultimately create the demand of tomorrow? These questions require effective knowledge management, which, in turn, is possible only using extended methods of information management.