Today's manufacturing environment is very complex, ranging from customer demand for product diversification and variability to supply chain networks and corporate IT infrastructure. When striving toward a perfect plant, manufacturers seek more visibility into what's going on across its global operations to assess risk and uncover opportunities. But what can manufacturers do when complexity impedes visibility?

Market leaders meet this challenge by rising above the complexity by effectively transforming their network of internal and external plants, suppliers, outsourcers, and trading partners to act as a single, virtual, global plant floor. Companies need to enable a single view across multiple companies with disparate systems to minimize costs without negatively effecting customer service. SAP helps you address this challenge by providing solutions and services for manufacturing network planning and execution.

SAP solutions help empower customers to gain complete visibility into operational demand, supply, and production dynamics combined and integrate processes to continuously update network-wide production planning and execution. Such visibility and integration can allow you to:

• Consolidate network-wide production planning – Minimize lead times across multiple plants, products, and suppliers with detailed actionable production plans.
• Coordinate network execution – Reduce customer stock-outs, work in process, and finished goods or material inventory through on-time, on-demand production execution and associated material pull through to plan.
• Enable intelligent event monitoring and control – Respond to unplanned events through complete visibility across the network and operational intelligence, enabling continuous update planning and execution.

SAP partners provide critical complementary solutions, which can assist in inventory optimization and real-world awareness to further increase manufacturing responsiveness, while decreasing costs. Services from SAP and our partners include value assessment studies, detailed road maps, and implementation expertise.

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