The global spread of the coronavirus has affected many enterprises across various industries including that of the food processing industry. Specifically, supply chains in the industry sector are disrupted keeping businesses vigilant in strengthening and advancing their supply chain capabilities. This is what the global dairy manufacturer GRB Dairy Foods did to ensure that the company succeeds amidst the pandemic by adopting intelligent technologies for maximum productivity and profitability.

GRB Dairy Foods, a dairy major and a host of F&B offerings with a presence across the Asia Pacific, Middle East, Europe, and North America, has tapped SAVIC Technologies as its technology partner in deploying the next-generation, intelligent ERP business suite SAP S/4HANA. 

Known for its top-class, innovative products including the first “Granulated Ghee”, GBR Dairy Foods has decided to migrate from its legacy ERP platform to completely synchronise its business processes and end-to-end visibility in stock tracking along its supply chain. The company has chosen SAVIC Technologies Pvt Ltd as its end-to-end technology partner for the SAP S/4HANA migration after recognising the intelligent ERP’s capabilities in ensuring quality management control, business operations automation, and quick adoption to unique customer requirements.

Aside from the 100 percent business processes synchronisation and 360-degree visibility in stock tracking along its supply chain, GRB Dairy Foods has also achieved a 20 percent surge in daily dispatches.

Senthilkumar S, Managing Director at SAVIC Technologies shared how SAP S/4HANA promotes business continuity. He said:

“SAP S/4HANA unlocks the true business potential of an enterprise in a digital, networked economy.”

“With an unprecedented niche in SAP offering, our team at SAVIC Technologies simplifies the IT landscape of enterprises, reducing their OPEX and driving new revenues and profits. With real-time insights from across business processes in an enterprise, business heads benefit from a proactive approach in mitigating discrepancies for continued operations in a disaster scenario,’’ he added.

GRB Dairy will leverage SAP S/4HANA to realise the company’s expansion objectives and ensure business continuity in the time of COVID-19. With a workforce of over 1,000, the dairy enterprise based in Tamil Nadu, India has a goal of automating and streamlining mundane, tedious tasks for enhanced profitability and workplace efficiency. The company has identified that the key issue restricting productivity output and loss of critical man-hours is the lack of synchronisation among its internal and external departments.

Now, GRB Dairy has the capacity to adapt accordingly to the changing market conditions as well as benefit from real-time monitoring of packaging for better quality control with increased control and greater visibility.

Advancing the Food Processing Industry

In the food processing industry, enterprises leverage SAP S/4HANA’s capabilities to roll out high quality, batch managed offerings aligned with global standards and regulations. Bringing end-to-end solution in the supply chain including procurement, the strategic benefits of the solution are as follows:

• Ensures quality control by fetching production staff with recipes and process instructions
• Offers support for SAP ERP applications with dairy-specific features
• Transforms business into a future-ready enterprise to mitigate any market challenges
• Optimises production plans, both product-wise and as per regional demands.
• Keeps a track of the changing market landscape including product supplies in the previous months, available inventory, and the current status of the product in the market, management of raw materials. 

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With the integration of the SAP Global Batch Traceability application, the solutions offer enhanced connection to smart devices in the Internet of Things, providing access to more data across the digital supply chain, enabling reduced transportation cost and increases productivity and fulfilment speed.

“These new release show our continued innovation in both the digital supply chain and logistics,” Markus Rosemann, vice president, SAP Digital Logistics, said. “As companies look to digitalise their business, products and processes, we are helping them put supply chain and logistics at the centre of this business transformation.”

In SAP Transportation Management, a single user interface for air cargo security will allow customers to add additional parameters to optimise scheduling processes, which improves freight scheduling and raises productivity, while advanced planning innovations help to optimise flexible vehicle space capacity.

The new version of SAP Extended Warehouse Management offers enhanced analytics for key performance indicators, such as outbound delivery items, service level analysis and warehouse capacity usage, to enable better handling of smaller, more complex and frequent shipments via a new SAP Fiori app. This app allows for flexible picking for multiple customer orders in a single pick run.

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Anaplan predicts all sectors in the supply chain environment will see unique challenges in the rapidly evolving digital world with products becoming platforms for services and company assets fast becoming connected platforms. Organisations are also flush with avalanches of data, and now have the tools to model, plan, and predict outcomes and to develop insights.

Prediction #1 – The era of artificial intelligence and blockchain

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will transform supply chain planning. While supply chain planning in the past has been driven by “history-based forecasting,” AI and ML will be now become the drivers of supply chains. Many business processes will be transformed as a result of AI/ML based predictive models. These processes include: demand sensing/shaping/orchestration, supply planning based on AI predictions, dynamic AI based pricing, new product introduction based on predictive market intelligence, promotions management, and dynamic responses based on predictive disruptions in the supply chain.

Next generation collaboration in closed blockchain models will also bring together trading partners much closer not only because they will cut banks out of the picture and leverage distributed ledgers and cryptocurrencies, but also because in this model, trading partners will have much tighter collaboration around supply chain planning and execution decisions.

Prediction #2 – The onset of track and trace

Track and trace technologies are finally coming of age. What started as the RFID movement a decade ago is now coming to a head with sensors and devices across machines and assets. Internet of Things (IoT) will make data pervasive across all parts of supply chains and that data will be consumed and analysed by AI and ML engines, which will transform supply chains.

Prediction #3 – Sensing demand

Supply chain plans must have the ability to ‘sense’ demand in the market on a near real time basis and have the ability to ‘respond’. This requires next-generation technologies that connect businesses to their customers, consumers, and end markets and process demand data to streamline plans. Previous generation S&OP processes are evolving to next generation IBP/connected planning processes in which planning decisions are made dynamically by taking into consideration profitability and financial impacts of supply chain decisions. Emerging IBP/connected planning models will also require new governance models and a different leadership approach in the year ahead.

Prediction #4 – Smart data and decision as service

Business will expect more context to be captured with data, such as labelling with smart tags, so that professionals in a number of areas can effectively use this information.  Faster resolution of issues, speedy new product introduction, anticipatory customer outreach and services, and more accurate inventory planning based on real-time information are some of the areas where smarter data is going to be available.

Supply chain planners will leverage concepts such as deep learning and heuristics-based algorithms as part of their technology platform to enhance decision quality and accuracy.

As Jim McParlane, vice-president, Asia-Pacific, Anaplan, explains, “Ultimately, in the year ahead we will see planning platforms that will learn from both data and human planning processes to know what information is needed where. When everyone in a market is chasing competitive advantage, openness to new experiences, approaches and methodologies becomes an essential trait.

“However, information is key to developing this kind of agility. The more timely an organisation’s information, the faster the decisions and action the company can take. When information is both accurate and available in real-time, managers have the ability to make informed decisions the moment issues or changes, are identified. Strategies can be developed and acted upon, their success measured and further improvements introduced in shorter cycles of time.”

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Gartner has placed SAP Integrated Business Planning in the Leaders quadrant of the ‘Magic Quadrant for Sales and Operations Planning Systems of Differentiation’, and listed SAP as a top five manufacturing and operations software vendor by revenue in its ‘Market Snapshot: ERP Manufacturing and Operations Software, Worldwide’.

ARC Advisory Group ranked SAP as a leading supplier in its ‘Warehouse Management Systems Global Market Research Study’ and its ‘Transportation Management Systems Global Market Research Study’.

ARC’s Warehouse Management study said, “Unlike the other leading suppliers, SAP also offers a warehouse control system integrated into their WMS for the control of material handling equipment”, and noted SAP’s “major investment focus” in the Internet of Things for its impact on logistics solutions.

“The new business processes in today’s digital economy place an unprecedented emphasis on a responsive and flexible supply chain,” said Hans Thalbauer, senior vice president, digital supply chain and Internet of Things, SAP.

“This group of industry recognitions provides further proof that we have created a supply chain planning solution that meets the needs of today’s complex business environment. We continue to deliver innovations for our customers that set the standard for digital supply chain leadership.”

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Blockchain is a digital ledger that can be used to drive business processes involving multiple parties.

“One of the things blockchain does is facilitate greater visibility and trust,” said Joe Fox, senior vice president, business development and strategy, SAP Ariba. “In embedding it across our applications and network, we can enable supply chains that are smarter, faster and more transparent from sourcing all the way through settlement.”

SAP Ariba will first apply blockchain to the tracking and tracing of goods in procurement and supply chains.

“One of the biggest issues that companies face right now is tracking and tracing goods before, during and after shipment,” said Dana Gardner, principal analyst, Interarbor Solutions. “All too often, a seller will ship something to a warehouse where it is swapped for a knock off without the buyer knowing. The distributed ledger capability of blockchain provides buyers and sellers with increased visibility and control from shipment to receipt, which ultimately reduces the risk of fraud.”

To extend its capabilities in this area, SAP Ariba will join forces with London-based fintech Everledger, whose solution securely captures the defining characteristics of valuable objects such as diamonds, and creates a digital thumbprint of the asset that is stored on the blockchain.

This information, including history, transport, events and ownership, is used by multiple stakeholders across global supply chains to verify authenticity.

“By harnessing the best of disruptive technology, we’ve built a global platform of provenance by connecting records of authenticity to a physical object and its certification as it moves throughout the supply chain,” says Leanne Kemp, CEO and founder of Everledger. “We know the impact this can have. Integrating our technology with SAP Ariba’s business network can not only lead to a reduction of risk and fraud for stakeholders, but additionally helps to re-shape a new era of global trade focused on the pillars of transparency, sustainability and ethics.”

According to Fox, such technology is a natural fit within SAP Ariba’s solutions. “If you can track and trace diamonds, you can track and trace anything,” he says.

The announcement was made at SAP Ariba Live this week in Las Vegas.

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DDIQ uses artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate human cognitive processes to automatically generate in-depth risk profiles of organisations and their key directors and officers. Such profiles are time consuming, prone to errors and expensive to create manually.

DDIQ’s machine learning algorithms search through vast amount of structured and unstructured sources in 48 languages on the internet to cut through false positives and automatically flag potential risk issues on a subject. A full audit trail of the investigation is presented along with the report, divided into easily comprehensible categories.

SAP Ariba will use DDIQ as part of its supplier risk solution to monitor third-party suppliers, enabling organisations to meet compliance regulations while reducing risk and reputational damage for inappropriate behaviour or illegal practices among third-party suppliers.

“Regulators around the world have high expectations about the level of knowledge organisations have about the practices of those in their supply chain,” said Dan Adamson, founder and CEO, OutsideIQ.

“But traditional compliance is expensive. Corporations need a faster, easier way to provide auditable due diligence reports and avoid exposure to costly fines imposed by regulators or significant reputational damage.”

“In leveraging OutsideIQ’s DDIQ platform, we can provide companies with the real-time awareness and transparency they need to proactively identify risks related to regulatory and legal compliance and make informed decisions to mitigate it,” said Padmini Ranganathan, vice president, products and innovation, SAP Ariba.

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The cloud-based Integrated Business Planning solution for sales and operations planning, demand sending and forecasting, investors and supply optimisation.

“With customer expectations and market conditions changing constantly, companies increasingly require collaborative planning with powerful analytical capabilities to ensure accurate and agile execution,” said Hans Thalbauer, senior vice president, Digital Supply Chain and IoT, SAP.

“Our integrated planning solution allows our customers to align business objectives with operations to achieve top-line growth and higher profits, while significantly improving customer service, order fulfillment and end-user engagement.”

Companies in the automotive, chemicals, consumer products, distribution/retail, high tech, manufacturing, mill products and mining, pharmaceuticals and service industries are using the Integrated Business Planning solution to connect disconnected data sources and processes, reduce reliance on collaboration over email and in Microsoft Excel, and provide opportunities for ‘what-if’ scenario analysis.

Some of the enhancements to this version of the solution include:

• Improved ABC/XYZ segmentation, enabling companies to make planning, cost and service decisions that are appropriate to specific customer and product segments.
• Machine learning, embedded into the suite through SAP Clea.
• Further enhancements to planning algorithms, enabling increased automation.
• New configurable analytics and dashboard apps for improved monitoring and decision support.
• New supply chain network visualisation.
• Enhanced product lifecycle management capabilities including phase-in and phase-out modelling for efficient product launches.
• A new process orchestration app.

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As new products are now often a combination of mechanical parts, sophisticated electronics and software, information about these product elements can be maintained across multiple repositories, presenting difficulties for designers in accessing data.

The SAP Engineering Control Center interface to ECAD integration tool aims to overcome these issues by providing a consolidated view of ECAD data, such as printed circuit board assemblies (PCBA), associated project documents and PCBA parts with the mechanical CAD and ECAD product data stored in SAP software.

“Companies need to deliver increasingly complex products more efficiently as they look to leverage IoT to reimagine their business,” said Hans Thalbauer, senior vice president, extended supply chain and IoT, SAP. “The new interface to electronic design tools is a further step by SAP to provide customers with a complete, 360-degree view so that they can executive product development in an integrated environment for better business outcomes.”

The new tool was revealed at the International SAP Conferences on Extended Supply Chain and IoT, held this week in the Netherlands.

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The agreement will see SAP combine its extended supply chain solutions with UPS’s additive industrial manufacturing and logistics network to get products to market more quickly and cost-effectively.

This will include the digitisation and implication of the production part approval process through SAP, which the companies believe will enable a significantly higher number of industrial 3D print-ready production parts to be approved and certified. These can then be ordered through UPS On-Demand Manufacturing will full integration with SAP manufacturing and procurement processes.

It will also enable companies to automatically quantify the financial viability of 3D printing vs traditional procurement and manufacturing options, and then order via UPS for production and delivery, with tracking from within SAP.

According to UPS, its new on-demand network will benefits customers such as:

• Manufacturers wanting to reduce inventory for slow-moving parts,
• Manufacturers with short production runs where the cost to create the mould or tooling could make these orders too expensive for traditional manufacturing,
• Manufacturers and retailers of custom/semi-custom goods as additive manufacturing allows cost-effective customisation of goods,
• Industrial designers and engineers who want high quality rapid prototypes, and
• Entrepreneurs, start-ups and manufacturers who don’t currently have access to 3D printers or have limited capital and time and will use 3D printing for rapid prototyping and manufacturing of initial production runs.“Technology innovations such as 3D printing are revolutionising traditional manufacturing and redefine our notion of the industrial supply chain,” said Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board, Products and Innovations, SAP SE.

“By bringing together the on-demand manufacturing and logistics expertise of UPS and the extended supply chain leadership of SAP, we can enable direct digital manufacturing and an on-demand industrial manufacturing network that connects from manufacturing floor to the customer door.”

The announcement was made at the 28th annual SAPPHIRE NOW conference.

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The Virtual Conveyor utilises Freight robots, which are autonomous mobile platforms, together with warehouse employees and the SAP EWM. The associates pick goods from shelves and place onto a contain or a shelf on a Fetch robot, which is an advanced mobile manipulator. When all the goods are picked, the picker send the Freight robot to the packing station using either a mobile device or the robot’s touch screen. As the task is completed, SAP EWN is updated with the completed order and another Freight robot engages wth the employee for their next picking order.

According to Fetch Robotics, using such a system can reduce the physical demands on employees, who often spend a large amount of time traversing the warehouse floor, and increase the time they spend fulfilling orders.

“We’re delighted to combine our expertise in robotics with SAP’s experience in warehouse management,” said Melonee Wise, CEO of Fetch Robotics.

“It’s an innovative combination of hardware and software that benefits warehouse operators and their employees.”

“The combination of Fetch Robotics and our warehouse management system means that warehouse operators benefit from more efficient operation,” according to Franz Hero, SVP, supply chain and logistics development, SAP.

“This integrated warehouse functionality allows logistics companies to automate the transportation of picked and packaged goods within their warehouse and drastically improves the efficiency of the warehouse workers.”

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