Customer Collaboration

main process

SAP Supply Network Collaboration (SAP SNC) offers comprehensive capabilities in the customer collaboration area, allowing companies to share information and collaborate effectively with their customers on finished goods level. SAP SNC customer collaboration handles the end-to-end replenishment process ranging from receiving inventory and consumption information from the customer, to forecasting and the use of the forecast for short-term delivery adjustments, to truck load building and order generation, as well as communication to back-end systems on the supplier and customer sides. The main capabilities are tied together in a step-by-step business scenario called Responsive Replenishment, which also has advanced features for dealing with promotions as a separate demand stream, for validating incoming data files from customers, and triggering proactive alerts when exception situations are detected. In this context, another key SAP SNC feature is being able to receive frequent customer data updates (for example consumption) and being able to make immediate use of that information in the actual planning and replenishment process. As such SAP SNC has the capability to automatically adjust planned replenishments up or down depending on real demand updates. SAP SNC also has the capability to manage more traditional Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) replenishment scenarios using, for example, minimum and maximum stock balance limits as the replenishment driver, or managing forecast and order forecast collaboration activities between a supplier and customer, and integrating certain information to back-end SAP ERP and planning systems for, for example,
forecast contribution or availability checks.