Editor's note: The prosperity and fierce competition of the e-commerce industry,

Editor's note: The prosperity and fierce competition of the e-commerce industry, while injecting vitality into the market, but also put forward new requirements for the supply capacity of merchants, more and more customers have not only to meet the traditional e-commerce shopping mode, they pursue the personality of the product, nvidia partner the speed of distribution and the diversification of shopping methods, which put forward new and higher requirements for supply chain management. Find out how established ERP vendors are responding to these new challenges.

Personalized demand, integration of online and offline channels, and last-mile distribution have put forward higher requirements for supply chain management. SAP Outsourcing How to improve demand accuracy through machine learning? How to generate an order supply transfer plan to improve customer response? How to determine the best location for material storage under many constraints? SAP is the world's largest ERP (Enterprise resource planning) company, and operations research plays the role of "engine" in the solutions provided by SAP.

Article author: Zhuo Hongyi

Responsible editor: Liao Yuan, smart waste management Black tie division

The article was published in the wechat public account [Strategy OR Strategy] : [OM] SAP under the challenge of supply chain management

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Rapid growth of personalized demand

The consumption concept of the 80 and 90 generation, the main force of consumption, is constantly upgrading, and the personalized demand is growing rapidly, making customizable items more and more abundant.

Take shoes as an example, whether it is an international big name or a popular shoe brand, many shoe companies support customers to design their own shoes.

The range of choices for customers is no longer limited to colors and various predetermined styles. Some brands offer customers personalized options for the upper, tongue and sole of the shoe, while others can add a customized Logo.

There's not much of a price difference between mass-produced and custom shoes, so who wouldn't want a pair of stylish shoes that won't hit your face?

Omni-channel integration of online and offline

Omni-channel sales is also a topic that businesses cannot avoid. Whether it is a traditional offline business started by the enterprise, or the recent rise of mobile Internet e-commerce, everyone is trying to do online to offline integration, hoping to play omni-channel sales.

Merchants are eager to skip the middleman retailers and go direct to consumers, selling online or in their own retail stores, while still hearing the real voice of the customer.

Uniqlo, a popular clothing brand, has not only actively expanded its offline physical stores, but also opened a flagship store on Tmall. In order to avoid the situation that consumers only shop through online channels, Uniqlo also launched the service of placing orders online, convenient picking up goods in offline stores to enjoy discounts, and attracting customers to experience shopping in offline physical stores.

Last mile delivery problem

While Ali and Jingdong and other e-commerce bring more business opportunities to enterprises, they also pose a huge challenge to merchants, that is, how to solve the problem of last mile delivery.

Consumers have become so spoiled that when they experience same-day delivery, they are less likely to buy goods that take days to deliver.

A typical example is that within a 3km radius of Hema Fresh free delivery, the sales of other retail stores will be affected.

In the face of the increasingly strong personalized needs of users, omni-channel sales model innovation and distribution timeliness requirements, enterprises are faced with a serious practical problem: must open up the end-to-end supply and demand chain, quickly meet the needs of customers.

In order to achieve this goal, enterprises need to upgrade the existing supply chain and transform it into a holistic solution, so they need to carry out synchronous digital transformation and upgrading on the basis of the original ERP system.

Limitations of traditional ERP software

Traditional ERP software is designed for manufacturing enterprises as the core, which contains modules mainly finance, production planning and material management, through a common database to achieve the integration of modules.

However, for some reasons, some ERP software modules may be independent of each other, and the data from each other is not connected. For example, the so-called ERP system used by some enterprises can only achieve financial and warehouse account management functions, and the key material requirements plan is still calculated manually, and then imported into the system.

With the addition of more business modules, such as the transportation and distribution warehouse management function, this puts a huge burden on the already struggling ERP, and can not help enterprises upgrade the digital supply chain.

Even if ERP software has strong integration functions, they need to add some external application system to achieve end-to-end supply chain management, such as an external warehouse management or transportation management system.

Facing the huge market of supply chain management, various ERP manufacturers have also given their own solutions, the following we introduce SAP supply chain product solutions, to make a preliminary understanding of this field.