Give your Supply Chains a Boost with Data Ingestion, Advanced Analytics and AI
Meet the Authors
Key Takeaways
⇨ Organizations must navigate a rapidly changing business landscape influenced by geopolitical shifts, regulatory requirements, and climate concerns, necessitating an adaptable approach to supply chain management.
⇨ PwC leverages pre-configured SAP solutions and its SCOR benchmarking model to enhance supply chain efficiency and performance, integrating factors like AI and Industry 4.0 for improved operational intelligence.
⇨ End-to-end visualization tools are essential for organizations to assess the effectiveness of their strategies and workforce, enabling informed decision-making and risk management.
Organizations across the world are in the midst of an ever-changing business environment. They work to succeed despite constant geopolitical changes, regulations around environmental, social and governance (ESG), climate concerns and many other obstacles. They also consider how they can free up enough capacity to either produce more products more efficiently, or produce new products based on customer demand.
Jeffrey Briner, who leads the SAP Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), told SAPinsider that the problems that organizations are facing have not necessarily changed, but more the environment that they are operating in is shifting. “Our stated mission is that we solve big problems and build trust in society,” Briner said. “And that trust is key – when companies come to us, we’re just generally part of a big transformation. If a customer has something related to just a single problem within supply chain, we can absolutely help there, but where our biggest value is making sure supply chain elevates as part of an SAP S/4HANA transformation.”
Overcoming Economic Challenges
PwC offers a package of tools, templates and pre-configured solutions across a range of SAP products and business functions through its Value Platform.
“As a $6 billion company delivering thousands of projects of all kinds, we at PwC realised we created a center of excellence specifically to harvest things like leading practices, requirements and capabilities across all those projects,” Briner said. “We’ve been able to consolidate all that – whether they are SAP or not – coming together as good business leading practices.”
PwC offers SAP-centric architectures and solutions through its Edge Solutions products and are available in different iterations for virtually every industry, including utilities, energy, chemicals, process industries, consumer, lifecycle and transportation. “Pre-configured means that the offering has more than just a couple of configuration settings – it’s the operating model you would execute that in, its capability model down to level five, it’s all the SAP configuration, training and everything else we need to deliver so we can deliver faster and it becomes more repeatable in terms of quality and risk to our clients and their projects,” Briner said.
Benchmarking supply chains
PwC uses a benchmarking model called SCOR, or Supply Chain Operations Reference- model, to measure supplier reliability, responsiveness, agility, cost and more. “PwC in 2011 acquired a company called PRTM, which was the inventor of SCOR, and has since injected the model into the DNA of PwC’s supply chain practice,” Briner said.
“The original SCOR was ‘plan, source, make, deliver’, but we’ve evolved it a little further out to include ‘support, operate and maintain’ to form a whole end-to-end lifecycle
of everything that could impact supply chain in there. We’ve also embedded cyber, controls, ESG and clean data. “We can take SCOR in more dimensions now than just the supply chain organization too – it also integrates into the entire organization now with the way we’ve deployed it.”
Supply chains have leveraged data and intelligence to make them run more efficiently, but the recent explosion of AI is also opening possibilities in further improving performance and visibility. PwC’s supply chain intelligence capabilities include providing data ingestion tools and using advanced analytics and AI to convert operational data into actionable and insightful visualizations. Within the SAP context, these intelligent solutions are part of the company’s Industry 4.0 product range like industrial internet of things (IIoT) and smart manufacturing software.
“Industry 4.0 looks much deeper at the end-to-end view of a customer’s data from either an operational point of view, a supply chain or a procurement,” Briner said. “It almost doesn’t matter because all that’s built into SCOR, but Industry 4.0 gave that vision end-to-end around how to be efficient and effective when you start integrating operations and engineering and maintenance and supply chain and having more accurate and timely financials and cost view to what you’re doing.”
Briner added that when an organization has the levers that can be visualized real-time, that gives businesses whole new platforms to do product development or business planning, integrated planning going into the future.
Leading with Insights
PwC built a tool called Leading with Insights (LWI), which has SCOR built-in, plus leading practices. It also features the same pre-configured solutions tailored to specific industries via data models. “When you bring those data models in, LWI lets you drive out KPIs around operations, engineering, supply chain procurement, warehousing, logistics and other modules available in SAP,” Briner said. “We’ve got the KPIs that we can pull the data into LWI, figure out what’s going on and present it in ways that you can make forward-looking decisions.”
SAP’s acquisition of Signavio also serves as a key piece to PwC’s supply chain offerings. “At PwC, we believe the most truly leading forward indicators you can get from a business are your people following the process. If they’re not following the process, it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen,” Briner said. “With the Signavio models tied to the data we pull in from LWI, we can let you visualize what’s going on in your business, how it’s either adhering to your processes or not. And when it’s not, is that impactful or not impactful? It lets you make risk decisions, resilience decisions and performance decisions in ways they’ve never been able to do it.”
What this Means for SAPinsiders
Centralization and intelligence go hand in hand – Organizations need a singular vantage point from which they can manage their business more effectively. Creating a center of excellence enables companies to track the requirements they need to meet, understand the capabilities they possess, and implement leading practices throughout each project.
Work smarter – Supply chain professionals have more tools at their disposal than ever before to bolster efficiency and effectiveness. AI solutions from partners like PwC can help companies improve their maintenance planning and integrate the overall organizations more intelligently.
Visualization is everything – Organizations can only properly evaluate which of their solutions are working when they have end-to-end visualization tools. These solutions allow them to assess the impacts of different strategies and how effectively their workforce is able to implement those strategies.
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