Advanced production planning in the Cloud
Today we have prepared another practical example from a customer who uses SAP ECC for production planning and execution, specifically in the Production Planning module.
The customer used both standard and some customized SAP FIORI and SAP R3 applications for the operation. From the beginning, the customer had a very precise idea of how they wanted to work efficiently with production planning on part of the production lines. There is already a standard FIORI application for production planning today, so in the first step this application was deployed and tested in practice. However, this application did not provide all the required functionality. Therefore, we were approached by the customer to analyse the customer’s requirements and to suggest whether it was possible to extend this standard application or to prepare a completely new application that would be tailor-made based on the customer’s requirements. However, there were a lot of new requirements, so modifying the standard application was not an option. So we started the development of a completely new application. For maximum convenience and simplicity, we incorporated all the latest controls into the new application so that the operator can carry out production planning by marking planned orders and moving and placing them on the timeline of individual machines. The entire application was aimed at making the production schedule make the most of the time capabilities of each individual workstation. So today, production is planned by moving planned orders in the form of “bubbles” sorted by materials produced from the bottom of the screen from the order backlog to the timeline of each workstation at the top of the screen. Of course, the application performs all the defined checks as it moves so as to minimize the possibility of making an error to a minimum. Additionally, it provides the ability to easily perform frequently performed operations such as converting a planned order to a production order or releasing or printing orders. Workers quickly became so accustomed to the new planning functionality that it is required to be extended to other parts of production in the future.
The new applications are based on modern SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) cloud products and are fully integrated with the internal SAP ECC environment. In addition, the new technology ensures secure, authenticated and reliable access for employees from the internal network as well as from the Internet environment. The application developed in this environment has a modern user interface and can be handled even by less experienced users. This application is therefore another great example that modern technologies on the Cloud platform can increase the productivity of a company, even in the field of production, with their simplicity and efficiency.
The solution is already ready today for the customer to further extend functions such as an app for mobile devices or extended analytics. In the future, it is not excluded that the optimization in production planning will be left to increasingly reliable artificial intelligence 😊.
In addition, the application hosted in a Cloud environment is ready for an easier customer transition from the current SAP ECC to the modern S/4HANA system, whether in the form of on-premise or Cloud.
