My experience with SAP is ongoing as I got to start working with it as a part of my role at Arc’teryx. I started a few months prior to going live with S4 HANA, a more recent version of the well-known SAP ERP platform.
SAP is a massive platform and my role was focused on ensuring we were able to cut over the company’s wholesale B2B platform from the old ERP to S4. This means I had about three months to get familiarized with SAP modules related to sales orders, inventory, pricing, materials and integrations (IDocs).
My experience thus far has been mixed but generally positive as time goes on. The great thing about SAP is that it can do just about anything. This is also the challenge. Unless you know which modules or windows (T-codes) to use for a given function, it’s quite difficult to know where to go. There isn’t really an interface out of the box that you can rely on. With such a massive platform, you’re forced to become a specialist as there’s no way you would interact with the whole system in a single role.
As a part of go-live with S4, I was tasked with configuring entirely new and separate B2B portals. This meant managing thousands of historical orders, bridging in-flight orders (ie. copying them), ensuring data from SAP flowing successfully and migrating about 300 users (sales reps, managers and support staff).
I could talk about some of SAP’s modules at length, but on this page I’ll wrap up by highlighting the types of functions I’ve supported:
- Extensive experience with sales order integration (into and out of SAP)
- IDoc monitoring and troubleshooting - I’ve set up monitoring and troubleshooting processes to support the modules relevant to my scope
- Materials Master to work with product data and ensure it flows down to our B2B system
- Business Partner (customer) area to manage customers, again in an integration capacity
- Inventory, particularly in juggling prebook and ASAP seasonality with factors such as PAL (product allocation limits) and BOP (back-order processing)