Microsoft Excel is used everyday across companies, however, many people may not know the advances implemented within the program.
These advances namely are Power Query and Power Pivot. These tools enable users to work in a more automated way with their Excel files and implement more seamless and advanced solutions within their spreadsheets. In the following, we will closely elaborate on these advances and reveal the additional potential they bring for the application.

Power Query and Power Pivot

Data gathering and cleaning can take up a large portion of time for people working with data. Therefore, tools aimed at automating these tasks can prove to be very beneficial. 

The purpose of Power Query, Excel’s built-in data engine, is to automate the getting and the cleaning of data in Excel using a user-friendly graphical user interface and with no need for any programming knowledge (such as VBA). This enables users to finish their tasks easier and quicker. Power Query supports direct connection to a large amount of data sources: folders, JSON files, databases, local computer files, web pages, SharePoint folders, etc. You can import data from all these sources into one Excel workbook and avoid the creation of multiple source sheets. This supports easy file transferability and a better overview.

After these steps you can explore Power Pivot. Power Pivot is capable of working with millions of rows of data compared to the limited capacity of Excel itself. It also enables the creation of calculated columns, measures to further analyze the data and gain valuable decision-relevant insights using Data Analysis Expression (DAX). DAX is able to return one or more values through exploiting functions, operators in formulas and expressions. This analysis goes above grid-style formulas and supports advanced solutions, for example time intelligence functions for easy time period comparisons.

Are you interested in exploring how SAP and our process knowledge could help you turn into working in a more automated and efficient way? Feel free to reach out to us for a consultation to see how we can help your business!

Measuring the efficiency and accuracy of our supply chain is very crucial in determining overall performance and ensuring that customers in the end of the day remain happy and satisfied. In the following post we will introduce one of our solution concepts that enables businesses to predict their future logistics and delivery performance by predicting OTIF deliveries.

 Are you interested in exploring how the prediction of OTIF deliveries can help your business? Feel free to reach out to us for a consultation to see how we can help your business remain competitive!

Purchasing departments help keep organizations healthy, because if they are unable to procure goods or services that are needed to meet operational needs while providing the highest possible value, then a company cannot deliver the best quality to their customer. Inefficient purchasing can cause increased costs, interrupted production, inconsistency, and overall delays. This makes it clear that purchasing needs to be done in an efficient way, but how can that be done? 

The procurement cycle is shown in the picture above. The process starts with determining material requirements from the planning side. From here onwards communications with different vendors can start. Monitoring is very important in this process. One of the main questions is: are the ordered materials on-time? After successfully receiving the orders, the payment processing can begin.

InfinITy consulting is specialized in different areas within SAP. Combining our process knowledge with our data science expertise, we can guide you in how to log, monitor and improve your processes in order to ensure that they are running smoothly and in the most efficient way. Do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to have more information about what InfinITy Consulting can do for you!

Exploring The Unknown!

Data science also aims at discovering potential not-yet-revealed problems and the solutions to these unknown areas. This helps prepare for unexpected happenings such as machinery failure or delivery problems. The analytical tools and techniques work by finding correlations, connections, patterns in large amount of raw data that are invisible to human eyes.

We hope you enjoyed this post elaborating on the importance and opportunities data science aims to bring for companies. In the following months, from different angles we will introduce the main concepts, relevant use cases and most important know-hows companies need to understand in order to become data-driven and to optimize their operations through leveraging data. Hope to see you next time again and in case of any questions feel free to reach out to us!

COVID-19 is hampering logistics worldwide, be it shipping your product out or receiving enough stock from your vendor. This logistical problem hits a lot of companies, small or big, and creates a constraint in terms of finished goods distribution. Most Sales and Supply Chain departments need to answer the following question; how to deploy our limited inventory while still keeping our promises and providing the highest value?

Answering this conflicting question is a puzzle that needs business input and system support. As more and more companies are moving towards an agile approach, flexibility and speed is required. Getting to a correct business input and setting the rules is hard and requires (flexible) people.

Systems, and in particular SAP, are rigid for business continuation. You wouldn’t want your system failing and not being able to ship out products for example. That rigidity however brings some inflexibility and increases throughput time if changes are required. In a situation like COVID-19 you want to be able to quickly adapt to a new situation and change your system where needed without disrupting business continuity.

A good solution would be to deliver the products only to high prio customers while also keeping inventory available for general customer satisfaction. This solution can be accomplished in a SAP system by means of Product Allocation. Based on a set of business rules you only promise what can be done, in terms of incoming and available inventory, keeping in mind the limitations of your (global) supply chain.

Just as I-Man, we can help you find the best fitting solution for this problem. InfinITy Business Consulting is deploying functionalities in end-2-end situations. In a next article we will dive into the details of Product Allocation in S4H with means of a use case. Do you recognize the inventory struggles or just want to know more on Product Allocation in general, feel free to contact us by any means possible.

With this partnership InfinITy Consulting and COMPUTD can guide customers to more efficient logistical processes. The joint force is to use artificial intelligence solutions and on-demand data science in combination with excellent knowledge of SAP and business processes. The results will be new insights which can be translated into new business cases with real added value.

We are looking forward working together and combine our knowledge to create excellent service for our customers!

About InfinITy consulting

InfinITy Business Consulting is a SAP Consultancy Company specialized in supply chain planning and supply chain execution solutions. InfinITy helps a variety of customers in various industries in realizing these ambitions and aims to create customer satisfaction through turning the in-depth SAP product knowledge into a solid simplified business solution.

About COMPUTD

COMPUTD is specialized in providing services in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Science. COMPUTD aims at becoming the trusted data science expert by taking the client on a data journey. The data journeys helps the clients going towards data-driven decision making, reducing costs, and improving efficiency.

What is MRP LIVE?

MRP Live on HANA (MD01N) was implemented to improve MRP performance on HANA. This is a new MRP mode, which has been fully redesigned to run  in-memory. It can  run in background  as well as in foreground.

MRP-controller benefits:

• More up-to-date supply and demand information that forms the base for decisions.
• Faster reaction to demand changes reduces the risk of stock-outs and means that you can reduce safety stocks.
• Match demand and supply more efficiently than was previously possible.
• Identify and react to issues faster than was previously possible.

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When to use? Classic vs MRP Live

For each low level code, which planning run is used depends on the MRP parameters defined for the materials in the material master record and in Customizing. Below is the sequence of planning when using MRP Hana.