Hello Mohamed,
Unfortunately there is no single "best practice" document or
process on how to conduct blueprint workshops. If you are not a management
consultant then you can actually live without this phrase to make life simpler.
You can call it a solution design meeting or simply a business requirements
validation or to sound a bit more glamorous a business process mapping workshop
Since many first timers may have such a question, I shall attempt to give some guidelines.
What you do in a blueprint workshop depends on how much is already sold
and bought by the client and how much of SAP investments the client has already
done and what is the future system landscape, before you moved in as
consultant to figure out the details of what needs to be done to implement the
same. I won’t know what the level of engagement is but there are several other
factors that set the motivations for blueprint exercise.
Before getting into these kinds of workshops, your ideal first step
should be thinking through high level solution realization alternatives based
on broad stated outcomes. This can be known from the guys who sold the licenses
and/or some initial interactions with leadership. Your prior business knowledge
is the one that will count the most. An agreement on strategy with other
members of the project team is very important as expectation management is the
most crucial success factor of such workshops. Do not over commit (e.g. demand
planning at X level will reduce inventories by 40% or Optimizer will save costs
by over 100%). Do not contradict with colleagues who are complimenting in related areas because of convenient division of labour. Keep in mind that you are not marketing the application here.
Your next step is then to construct clear set of questions to elicit
responses in a broad process area. Towards this end you may find SAP solution
manager’s preconfigured processes very useful. Since this is detailed out
already, you can borrow the same as a template to base your questions.
For example if your customer wants to implement a formal process of
sales and operations planning, you may need to have responses to questions like
these
What are the primary motivations behind implementing a formal sales and operations planning
a) I want to reduce aggregate inventories by at least 20% in next two years
b) I have not been managing capacity well enough
d) I have too many new products that operational planners don’t account for quickly
d) With proper S&OP I can also subcontract some capacity to anothercompetitor
e) All
Usually the answer would be all. But digging deeper will help prioritize
the real objectives and bring you closer to design.
What is the typical range of lead times of products you sell to your
customers?
This might give some clues on what the planning horizon and planning
frequency should and planning time fence be. Should it be global, Should it be
product specific. What periodicity etc.
What are the most important objectives of your current demand planning
processes and what improvements are you expecting in the future
- Minimize inventory build ups
- Improve customer service
- Maintain a low forecast error at product level
- Predict customer demand accurately for each SKU
- To at least meet the 5 year corporate revenue targets
- To minimize skewed distribution of demand !
Responses to this question might help you get closer to whether or not the client is inclined to using collaborative demand / supply planning and what is the main expected outcome from demand planning
Hope this provides some direction.
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