Have you ever thought about ‘going to the cloud’ wall-to-wall? With the full depth and breadth of industry capabilities? In this blog, I would like to share what ‘in the cloud’ means for an automotive supplier.
No matter if you tend to go for a public or private cloud environment, SAP supports your endeavors with a wealth of automotive capabilities that help you achieve your goals, be competitive, and maximize customer satisfaction as well as your profits.
So how exactly does SAP support you?
Lately, SAP has been investing significantly in state-of-the-art capabilities to meet automotive supplier requirements; by releasing multiple seamlessly integrated industry cloud and SAP S/4HANA solutions.
Let’s give some examples:
The ability to handle scheduling agreements and release processing is essential to an Automotive supplier. Critical processes in the automotive industry include receiving delivery schedules and planning and delivering accordingly. With just-in-time (JIT) and just-in-sequence (JIS) deliveries, automotive suppliers can take scheduling agreement processes a step further. Few industries have operations that are as sophisticated as the relationship between automotive manufacturers and suppliers.
Not a lot of solutions can meet these requirements, but SAP can! With SAP S/4HANA combined with the industry cloud solutions for Automotive, SAP addresses the end-to-end JIT and JIS process, including specialties such as packing and grouping for sequencing, delivery confirmation, and self-billing processes.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud, in conjunction with SAP’s industry cloud solutions, provides capabilities that enable you to meet your customers’ needs.
SAP has you and your customers covered whether you would like to pack automatically based on packing instructions, carry out inventory and warehouse management based on handling units, or manage your returnable packaging efficiently. The new SAP Returnable Packaging Management solution based on SAP Business Technology Platform not only enables account postings and automated matching of statements. This new industry cloud solution will also provide returnable planning and rental processes* – in a modular and flexible way, but still tightly integrated with the intelligent core.
Another automotive-specific process is self-billing. The customer sends a self-billing invoice stating how much they intend to pay. The supplier then keeps the invoice and waits for the self-billing invoice to be sent via EDI. As soon as the self-billing invoice is received indicating the quantities requested and the amount the customer intends to pay, the items will need to be matched with the shipping documents and the internal invoice on the supplier side.
SAP has released a new industry cloud solution called SAP Self-Billing Cockpit that helps match these items automatically and effortlessly. Based on tolerances that can be freely defined, the solution automatically creates a new open item based on value or quantity differences. SAP Self-Billing Cockpit is enhanced with simulation and mass processing capabilities and has an end-to-end Fiori user interface for an improved user experience. Also, the solution is planned to handle country specifics such as for Spain and Italy*.
- Outlined best practices
- Ease of adoption
- Effortless maintenance
The rich industry capabilities mentioned above and the fact that new capabilities can be consumed independent of release cycles make the solution even more compelling.
*Future functionality
I hope you like my blog on our cloud solutions for Automotive suppliers. Please feel free to reach out to me for feedback and questions.
Where to find further information:
Just-in-Time / Just-in-Sequence
SAP Returnable Packaging Management
A big thank you to Bernd Goldfuß from SAP Product Management for contributing to this blog.
