Design, Standardization and Automation of Halifax Fan’s Quote to Cash process on SAP ByDesign

Abstract

Halifax Fan Group is an industrial fan manufacturing company currently located in 5 locations worldwide, operating either through owned manufacturing facilities or in partnership with local manufacturers as sub-contractors. There are currently plans in place to expand to other underserved regions in the world and capture those markets. Due to the low-cost nature of said markets, the consideration is to work with local partners. To support this a process is required where HF can share its systems infrastructure with said partners all the while ensuring that the critical proprietary technical designs of their products are maintained under strict access control. This can be managed via setting up a standard design structure in SAP in conjunction with external configuration systems and taking away the need to design products at the partner products, this in turn also ensures that the partners can focus on their core business which is manufacturing and do not have to expand resources on designing, planning, and setting up systems. Here comes the requirement for this business project, where said process is to be designed where the process is standard across multiple product configurations and is set up in a way which leverages the best practice capabilities of the systems involved. Here are the two main components involved: 1. SAP Business ByDesign: SAP’s offering based on cloud infrastructure and a Saas model catering to mid-sized entities 2. An external proprietary fan configurator: Which communicates with SAP using a two-way API with built-in real-time quotation capabilities in The process being designed as a whole is a Quote to Cash order involving multiple components of SAP including Production Planning, Supply Chain and Warehousing, Materials Management, Sales and Distribution as well as Finance. There are touch points within each of the areas and the process is aimed to set up in a way which leverages automation capabilities in each of the modules. This project will mainly revolve around creating production hierarchies using Bills of Materials and Bills of Operations while ensuring that the process does not exceed two or three hierarchies within the design structure. The project will also be covering the system configurations to support these hierarchies and creation of products within the system