Spanning control and transparency
Globalization, cross-border sourcing combined with ever-increasing costs and demanding customer service levels call for increased integration of the value and supply chains with low-cost providers for greater end-to-end process control. In order to manage the cost and quality of these global supply and value chains, companies must have precise cost and profitability data for each product and process, ranging from profit centers, business areas, divisions, legal entities and sometimes even across affiliates such as venture partners and supply networks.
Many companies overcome the challenge of extended supply chain planning with the implementation of enterprise-wide demand-and-supply planning systems (such as SAP APO) that connect to other internal and external operational systems, whether SAP or non-SAP. However, interfacing with multiple clients and cost structures within the current SAP environment, significantly constrains enterprise costing and value chain planning.
Companies wishing to get accurate data for their global value chain across national and enterprise boundaries are faced with the issue that their systems lack the capability to provide detailed and accurate profitability, COGS and company margins by product and customer across these various dimensions. This predicament is often overcome with a myriad of Excel spreadsheets and/or complicated custom applications and interfaces.
In order to create the transparency necessary to manage global supply and value chains successfully, the entire value chain must be modeled on one system and provide functionality for the handling of local, historic and group currencies, inter-company profits, ability to retain the cost component split throughout the value chain - even when legal entities and countries change, as well as simulation capabilities. These requirements can either be met by SAP standard solutions like Material Ledger and Group Costing if the system and organizational structure allow this, or with add-on solutions.
How Westernacher Can Help
Westernacher can help you to decide and design the optimal solution. This can take the form of using standard SAP ERP, BI or add-on functionality like the Group Costing and Profitability engine.
Our solutions help companies to:
- Accelerate and automate the planning cycle
- Increase cycles for forecasts and rolling planning
- Capture accumulated inter-company profit(s) by market
- Capture results by product and by customer in local view as well as in group view
- Calculate and simulate cross-company value chains
Why Westernacher?
With our extensive experience in implementing and optimizing ERP systems, detailed know how in supply and value chain planning as well as our knowledge of your industry, we are uniquely positioned to help you get a clear view of your value chain. Using our group costing and profitability approach, we have already enabled major players in the chemical and engineering industries to gain complete insight into their COGS and product profitability across group, system and national boundaries.
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