The supply chain is an essential part of modern business operations, as it ensures the smooth flow of goods and services from production to consumption. Material management is a crucial factor in optimizing the supply chain, as it ensures that the right materials are available at the right time, in the right quantity, and at the right cost.
Material handling oversees the procurement, storage, and distribution of essential resources. However, it's not just about managing physical inventory; it's also about optimizing processes, reducing costs, and enhancing efficiency at every step. Its impact reverberates throughout all business operations, from minimizing stockouts to maximizing resource utilization. Ultimately, it drives competitiveness and fosters growth in today's dynamic market landscape.
SAP MM is a powerful module that businesses can leverage to enhance operational efficiency, minimize risks, and optimize resource utilization. As a part of SAP ERP, it encompasses all functions related to the supply chain, including planning, invoice verification, consumption-based planning, and vendor evaluation.
The module comprises various components and subcomponents that can be seamlessly integrated to work effectively. By adopting SAP MM, businesses can streamline their material management process, gain greater visibility and control over their supply chain, and make informed decisions that increase profitability and sustainable growth.
Here is a list of a few important sub-components of SAP MM:
- Master data
- Purchasing
- Inventory management
- Invoicing verification
- Physical inventory
- Material valuation
- Service management
Major challenges of SAP businesses with Material Management
Organizations using native SAP MM interfaces face several challenges, including complex user interfaces, limited integration, inflexible screens, suboptimal user experience, inefficiencies in inventory management, reduced reporting capabilities, and higher operational costs.
Before automation took the stage, for creating purchase orders in SAP, the user had to navigate through multiple transactions to generate material orders, bills, receipts, and invoices one by one. Ensuring comprehensive checks, including info records, pricing conditions, and material quantity for each order was a daunting task, contributing to operational complexities.
Here's a list of other challenges businesses encountered in material management before automation:
- Lengthy manual procurement cycles resulted in production delays and inefficiencies.
- Manual data entry and processing impacted inventory accuracy and financial records.
- Lack of real-time visibility hampered quick responses to demand changes and disruptions.
Automating SAP MM
Automating tasks in the SAP MM module speeds up the process and makes it more manageable, resulting in a higher ROI. With automation, you can process more data and scale to big data volumes while avoiding costly errors. Automation also frees up employees from mundane tasks, allowing them to focus on higher-value activities.
Automation Ideas in SAP MM
Standard SAP MM processes include procurement process, inventory management, material requirement planning, and vendor management. Determining which tasks to automate can take time and effort. If the process has repetitive actions, large amounts of huge data to process, and is time-consuming then it's time to opt for automation.
Here are some of the areas in SAP MM that can be automated to gain more efficiency:
- Purchase Order Creation based on predefined rules and triggers.
- Goods Receipt processing for accurate and timely goods receipt, reconciling with purchase orders and invoices.
- Invoice Verification to match invoices to purchase orders and goods receipts, ensuring accuracy and reducing manual intervention.
- Optimize Inventory Management through automation, maintaining optimal levels, reducing stockouts, and enhancing order fulfillment.
- Streamline Vendor Management by automating vendor database maintenance and communication improvement.
Advantages of Automating SAP MM
Automating the SAP MM module simplifies and streamlines operations and significantly increases the process speed and efficiency. As SAP MM can be integrated with other SAP modules, SAP MM automation unifies multiple data systems into a singular, cohesive ecosystem. Overall automation improves adaptability and scalability, thereby maximizing efficiency at all levels.
Automating material management is a crucial step for businesses to enhance their visibility and bridge the gap between their current and potential operations. By automating SAP MM, businesses can streamline the procurement process, from purchase requisitions to purchase orders, goods receipt, and invoice verification. This can significantly reduce the procurement cycle time, enabling businesses to become more agile and responsive to market changes.
Selecting Liquid UI as a medium for automating SAP MM can be a game-changing decision for organizations seeking to transform their material-related operations. Liquid UI's experts analyze your business processes and tailor your SAP workflows to prioritize accuracy and efficiency, ensuring that your business is prepared to tackle any material management challenges that may arise.
Automating SAP MM with Liquid UI offers several compelling reasons for organizations:
Automating with Liquid UI (LUI) streamlines the supply networks of SAP MM businesses and organizes their resources to create a more efficient material management flow.
LUI simplifies SAP MM processes to meet your specific needs with advanced customizations that reduce overall operations and logistics costs while improving productivity and accuracy.
Let’s look into the major benefits of automating SAP MM with Liquid UI
- Optimized Inventory Management: Automating inventory-related tasks such as stock movements and availability checks with Liquid UI minimizes errors and optimizes inventory levels. This prevents stockouts or overstock situations and improves overall supply chain management.
- Seamless Integration with External Programs: LUI’s seamless integration with external programs allows for the automatic exchange of data. This integration ensures real-time synchronization, reducing delays in processing and improving the accuracy of information across systems.
- Improved Reporting and Analytics: LUI provides real-time insights into SAP MM processes. It enables the generation of comprehensive reports and analytics, contributing to informed decision-making and improved strategic planning.
Real-Life Use Case: Advanced Energy
Our tailored SAP customization and simplification solutions cater to the unique needs of businesses, providing a seamless and efficient experience in the complex landscape of SAP Material Management (MM). Among the success stories that highlight the transformative power of our solutions is the notable case of Advanced Energy.
Let's delve into how Advanced Energy simplified their Purchase requisition creation time by 50% using Liquid UI.
Advanced Energy is a global leader in high-tech manufacturing and produces a range of advanced products that face challenges in simplifying their SAP MM process. Purchase requisition creation was the main task as these documents notify departments of material and external service requirements. They used to create approximately 10,000 purchase requisitions every year, which resulted in a time-consuming and tedious process that only a few individuals could complete quickly.
To address this issue, Advanced Energy approached Liquid UI, which allowed them to customize and simplify their purchase requisition screens without any ABAP modifications. As a result, they were able to streamline their process and roll out the simplified screens to their user community in less than two months, at a fraction of the cost of developing customized screens in ABAP.
Business benefits achieved by Advanced Energy with LUI:
- Simplified purchase requisition creation time from 8 minutes to 4 minutes.
- Saved an annual amount of over $100k.
- The software was easy and quickly implemented and integrated with the existing SAP environment.
- Limited resources to run and implement the software.
To know more about how Liquid UI Efficient SAP MM simplified the purchase requisition creation for Advanced Energy, you can download the case study.
Conclusion
With Liquid UI's innovative solutions tailored for the MM module, we've transformed complexity into simplicity. From mobile extensions to offline capabilities, our tools redefine the SAP experience, ensuring streamlined processes and enhanced efficiency.
Embrace the future of SAP MM with Liquid UI, where simplicity meets sophistication, making your material management journey seamless and intuitive.
