DVW Custom Development magic delivers a 97% SAP TPM performance improvement for a global CPG (without SAP HANA)

We recently completed an engagement for a global consumer goods company who, having implemented SAP TPM - and a notorious “tier one” SI TPM template - were struggling with the usability, complexity and performance of the solution.

​This combination of elements combined with a complex product hierarchy with thousands of products and the way in which promotion planning was carried out meant that it would take an experienced user approximately 10 hours to plan 12 months’ worth of promotions for a single customer. Multiply that by the number of customers a global company serves and you have an incredible amount of time spent just “feeding” the SAP TPM system.

The user community, understandably, had lost faith in the system.

We were approached to help because of our previous Custom Development and UX work at companies such as Heineken UK, Brake Brothers, Rieber & Son and SAP.

The brief was simple: Deliver a working, fully-integrated POC in 30 days that would demonstrate a 50% improvement in performance. Our customer was being understandably cautious and we were being tested.

Rather than focusing on building pretty, nice to look at screens we focused on the planning process and only that data that was necessary to complete the planning process. Optimising the UX is as often about what you don’t see on the UI as much as what you do see.

We also focused on on-system time i.e. the amount of time required for a user to complete an activity and kept the configuration and other system setting As-Is.

The enabling technologies we used were SAP UI5 and SAP Gateway so we were 100% compliant with the technology used by a wall to wall SAP customer.

The end result was a SAP TPM-based planning solution that reduced the on-system time required to plan 12 months’ worth of promotions for a single customer from 10 hours to 20 minutes. We overshot the target dramatically. By my calculations that’s a 97% improvement in overall performance.

If you are struggling with the UX and performance of your SAP TPM solution get in touch. We can help.

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