Addressing Supply Chain Challenges in a Post-Pandemic World

The COVID pandemic exposed the many risks in the supply chain, specifically around single-sourced materials. ‘Single sourced’ can refer both to materials sourced from one supplier as well as from one country or region. For example, as we saw with COVID lockdowns in China, at the same time some regions remained open for manufacturing, others were shut down. If your business does not build resiliency into supply chain sourcing, you can also be at risk from these external factors.

For businesses with large SAP instances—even those with robust supply chain analytics programs in place—an added challenge is collecting, consolidating, and presenting insights across all potential company codes and plants, since they often have multiple instances of an ERP system and variations within the data, perhaps based on geography or as the result of M&A activity. Whether a company is just starting to create a data strategy or already has a mature business intelligence initiative in place, it’s never easy to consolidate large data volumes into a single reporting solution. 

Systems like SAP are designed for data entry and optimized for operational efficiency; they are not designed to let users do analytics (let alone do self-service analytics that business users can use to find insights and take action). This is a perennial challenge.

Making Analytics Easy with ThoughtSpot SpotApps

That’s why we’re excited to team up with ThoughtSpot to deliver a new SpotApp. But first, what exactly is a SpotApp? 

SpotApps are out-of-the-box solution templates from ThoughtSpot built for specific use cases and data sources, such as SAP ECC or S/4 Hana. With SpotApps, it’s easy to accelerate deployment with pre-built pieces of code that are easy to map and implement directly from the product.

Introducing the Axis Procurement Vulnerability Analysis SpotApp

The new Procurement Vulnerability Analysis SpotApp for SAP (the “Axis PVA”) is designed to help supply chain organizations to get actionable instant insights from their global supply chain risks and understand where supply chain disruptions could occur, reducing risk and building resilience—more than just a data visualization.

This SpotApp is designed with different teams in mind:

• Direct material procurement teams
• Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) analysts
• Corporate risk teams

The Axis PVA lets users dig into supply chain vulnerabilities and find opportunities to bolster geographic resilience in many ways:

• Reviewing single-source, single-country or single-region materials
• Providing insights into potential solutions, such as alternative vendors to augment supply with similar products
• Pricing analysis to determine cost implications for switching the material source

For the organization’s analytics team, the SpotApp is designed around SAP base tables that exist within SAP ECC and S/4 HANA. No matter your SAP implementation, it is highly likely that this solution will simply be able to connect, extract, and use your data.

The Shortest Line Between Data and Supply Chain Insight

This PVA SpotApp is designed to get you up and running fast. Just connect your SAP supply chain data to ThoughtSpot and start building resilience into your supply chain.

You’ll find the Procurement Vulnerability Analysis in your ThoughtSpot SpotApp library. Review the documentation and give it a try today!