A Guide to Streamlining Supply Chain Performance

Leveraging Built-in Metrics in SAP Can Drive Smarter Decision

Over the years, I cannot tell you how many hours have been spent, at my request, to create KPIs to guide the supply chains I’ve worked in. Within my organization, we have invested in Tableau developers and Power BI powerhouses. We’ve loved Crystal Reports, had folks who spoke fluent BOBJ, and more recently, analysts that can Qlik with the best of them. I’ve always been a hands-on leader who deeply desired having a voice in the definitions of the KPIs that would guide our Supply Chain organization to success. With the best of intentions, over a 20-year career, I’ve directed my teams to reinvent the wheel over and over again. It’s the first thing I did every time I started working with my new team.

Little did we know that we had most of what we were creating outside of SAP, available to us directly within SAP. Seriously. The time came when I had to face some hard truths: Was I the one who was taking us away from a single source of truth? Did I repeatedly, albeit inadvertently, encourage the team to place their focus on reactive reports distributed outside the system? Was I, in effect, supporting a record and report mindset? And here’s the pièce de resistance: Did I really forget to sweat the asset that we were so heavily invested in? Yes. And more than once. And if you know, you know—I’m not alone.

We failed to appreciate that by looking for these critical pieces of information to drive integrated decisions within the system, we could actually stop the number-number-who’s got the number game! You know the one: It’s when you spend the meeting that was supposed to drive problem-solving and taking action on trying to figure out who has the correct information to begin with. So much wasted time and effort, so many frustrating conversations—many of which could have been avoided if I only knew then what I know now.

When we work live within SAP, using standard definitions and a grouping of KPIs that is balanced to achieve the outcomes we’re looking for, we can actually start to drive action and activities across the cross-functional team that makes the magic of supply chain performance happen. The metrics are there, folks. We just missed that chapter in training and implementation.

Recently, I had the opportunity to hear some of Sean Elliffe’s thoughts on finding quality metrics within SAP that are readily available for use. He takes us on a journey via an episode of Reveal TV where he highlights a fantastic list of KPIs for consideration to run a more productive supply chain. Sean’s focus was primarily on what’s been available in ECC—and we know that metrics have done nothing but grow in leaps and bounds as we’ve ushered in a new era with S/4.

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Whether you are trying to understand supplier performance, schedule adherence on the manufacturing floor, discern the quality of master data, evaluate process efficiency, or improve service levels to customers or overall inventory performance: there are tools available to you today to draw a baseline, demonstrate performance, and take actions to improve. Right in SAP.

The combination of both leading and lagging indicators shortens the time required to unlock value from a good set of productive metrics. Let me give you a simple example: Imagine being able to identify the number of times a material has stocked out over the last 12 months from within SAP as a lagging indicator. You may then want to look at a leading indicator to address it. You could look at your exception messages for date and quantity matching or the current rate of consumption vs. plan to help detect what is happening that’s throwing the plan out of sync. This enables a solid foundation of cross-functional communication across the team members to come up with corrections before the problems manifest in a way that compromises our performance to the customer or market.

As a leader of leaders, one of the best things we can do is start asking curious questions and prompt for cross-functional awareness. Asking our teams to look first to what’s available in SAP, improving the quality of data and understanding to be able to trust the system, and rallying around a set of metrics that drives the correct daily work and decision-making—all help us to get to a more productive, happy, well-integrated supply chain that delivers value for our customers. Go explore. We think you’ll be excited about what you can see.