SAP ABAP

In today's competitive environment, long lead times, poor due date performance and the inability to adapt to customer's demand changes are no longer tolerated. As a result, many companies have made significant investments in the implementation of constraint and demand-driven planning & execution approaches such as the Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR), Dynamic Buffer Management (DBM) and Replenishment (TOCR) solutions offered by Theory of Constraints (TOC) and LEAN. These solutions are designed to provide faster and more reliable deliveries and higher throughput with a minimum of cost and investment. However, due to the perceived limitations in functionality of standard ERP systems to support the requirements of especially complex hybrid environments such as "engineer-to-order" (ETO), "make-to-order" (MTO), "assemble-to-order" (ATO) and "make-to-stock" (MTS), and/or the perceived high cost to modify these systems, many have chosen expensive 3rd party Advanced Planning & Scheduling software requiring highly trained resources or have opted to build complex in-house-developed Spreadsheets and Databases to provide the information support outside their standard ERP system. Especially large organisations complain that this practice not only makes IT support costly, complex, and a significant business risk, but also jeopardizes the fast roll-out of best-practices such as TOC (and duplication of results achieved elsewhere). This paper presents a case study of how ABB, the largest supplier of power and automation technology globally, in partnership with Goldratt Research Labs and SAP, overcame exactly such a challenge. After many successful implementations of TOC over a period of 15 years (see appendix for sample results achieved), ABB identified TOC as a key strategic enabler to competitiveness and as an Operational Excellence "best-practice" to include in their rollout of best practices using their preferred ERP platform (SAP) as part of a global "One-simple-ABB" initiative. In the past, one of the major obstacles with the mass-deployment of TOC in ABB has been the lack of support from commercial ERP systems. This resulted in many in-house developed & 3rd party IT systems that made integration of systems, data exchange, centralized IT support and sustainability both costly and a major business risk. In addition, quite often the lack of support from ERP systems was mentioned as an obstacle to the implementation of TOC on the shop floor. Recent new developments and simplification by the Goldratt Group in TOC's planning and execution rules for managing operations & logistics (S-DBR, TOCR and DBM) meant that, for the 1st time, commercial ERP systems such as SAP could potentially support the deployment of TOC within ABB and due to the potential generic applicability of these solutions, could cater for all the variations and complexities in their 300+ factories around the globe without the need for 3rd party systems. This was a hypothesis worth testing, so ABB assembled a team of experts from ABB, Goldratt Research Labs and SAP. To focus the team and accelerate the definition and communication of the critical ERP modifications, Dr. Eli Goldratt recommended that the team use TOC's "Strategy & Tactic Tree", a new strategy tool developed by Dr. Eli Goldratt to identify, define and communicate all the changes in process, policies and measurements necessary and sufficient to achieve an organization's growth and stability targets. This tool and associated collaborative and concurrent development and testing process, allowed the team to define, communicate and test the IT blueprint that answered the What, How to and Why for all the modifications that was needed in the ERP system (SAP). This approach played a major part in achievement of the necessary buy-in from key stakeholders and successful implementation and achievement of rapid business results at the pilot plants in Czech Republic and Korea. Based on the results achieved and the high level of satisfaction from all stakeholders, the "TOC in SAP" solution can now be systematically rolled out to any of the 300+ ABB factories around the world