SAP’s next generation Service Parts Management
SAP has a long and strong journey into the automotive aftermarket industry showing that it is an important market segment. Innovation within the SAP service parts planning (SPP) solution has been ongoing for decades and product development was tightly done in cooperation and collaboratively with several of the larger automotive OEMs companies in the Automotive Aftermarket. In 2018 it was decided to bring Service Parts Planning Solution into S/4HANA as part of the core Digital Supply Chain solutions to enable the Intelligent Enterprise Suite based on S/4HANA
Now, we are happy to announce that SAP S/4HANA Supply Chain for extended Service Parts Planning – one major pillar for service parts management solutions – will be launched as part of SAP S/4HANA 2020. The availability of the Service Parts Planning in S/4HANA means a supply chain planning offer for companies that distribute large volumes of aftermarket service parts to numerous stocking locations, and, at the same time, it natively integrates with demand captured, order management and execution processes making Service Parts Management an end to end solution.
The core areas of Service Parts Management sit on the intelligent suite, interoperating with SAP’s Industry Cloud access to vertical solutions that leverage SAP Cloud Platform supporting customers to accelerate business operations while balancing cost efficiencies with advanced technologies. Additionally SAP Service Parts Management has the possibility to leverage access to the Unified Business Network extending business processes beyond the core business, facilitating the seamless exchange of data and insights across businesses and geographies to drive greater levels of collaboration and agility with suppliers.
Finally, being in SAP S4/HANA allows Service Parts Management to benefit from SAP S/4HANA business technology platform main path of innovation with a simpler architecture and eliminating master data redundancy.
Therefore, SAP’s next generation Service Parts Management leverages business processes applications and technology making available to the aftermarket players an enterprise-wide functionality covering end to end processes in an innovative platform.
The SAP solution portfolio evolved immensely from the introduction of financial accounting (RF) and inventory verification and management (RM) in 1975. From R/2 evolving into R/4, Business Suite and now SAP S/4HANA, the software evolved to fit different business models supported by end-to-end processes and best practices.
Specific Portfolios are offered already to different industries – see the automotive example – covering end-to-end processes with cross-digital integrated capabilities. SAP announced one more step supporting industries by announcing the Industry Cloud. This is an innovation space for SAP, partners and customers to provide both industry cloud solutions and applications that complement the intelligent suite using the Business Technology Platform.