pRoFILES
Lots of intricacies. Ever face the temptation to throw in
the towel and go back to a simpler program, like excel?
It’s true that some companies get really excited about the
idea of using APO but a couple of months later, many get
frustrated because so much data input and master data main-
tenance is needed. They start to think to themselves -- I can
do this on spreadsheet instead of taking the time to load and
maintain all this data into APO – or -- I have done this a million
times before, why do I have to do again? – But the reason we
switched over to SAP APO in the first place is to advance our
supply chain. At the end of the day, manual spreadsheets are
overall more time consuming. We’d rather spend our time do-
ing the strategic thinking rather than doing manual work.
How does Goodyear overcome these difficulties?
We have an excellent project team from both business and IT
and we have hired a consultant group who is well versed in our
specialized needs. Whenever we move to another country or
cluster of countries to implement this APO system, it is also essential What is the most important thing to con- Goodyear uses
that we have a good local team who understands the business culture sider when setting up a new SAP APO
SAP APO instead
of manual
of the country and are able to guide our micro outlook. system?
spreadsheets to
The answer to this is very, very clear; make
advance their
Why invest in a complicated supply chain while the world is the system as simple as possible. Whenever supply chain
still facing economic difficulties? you are surveying the requirements of your
In the past, Goodyear has acted as a traditional manufacturing users, they say that they want everything included into the new sys-
company, but we are shifting from manufacturing to a customer ori- tem, because they think it will make their life easier. What they don’t
ented market. Because of this, supply chain is becoming even more realize is that if you put every piece of information into the system,
important than before. Even though last year was one of the hardest it becomes way too complex and the users will end up frustrated and
we’ve ever faced, Goodyear knew that to gain more market shares, maintenance will also be a lot more difficult. Your role as the system
we couldn’t allow customer satisfaction to drop. In order to maintain provider means you have to really select what the most important
and improve our customer services, we needed a better and stronger parts of the system are. This means that when a user says a certain
supply chain. aspect would be a mere “nice to have,” you veto it.
www.chainaonline.com JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 35
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