All pallet
In the Internet age, business processes must increasingly be thought of and designed on a cross-company basis. Uniform cloud platforms bring together different players who can jointly design processes and exchange information in this way - away from the silo idea of information islands and towards contemporary, web-based business networking.
Existing SAP customers are showing increasing interest in such collaboration options, because the cloud now provides the mature technical basis for this.
Since the exchange of experience and the use of products from other partners also form the basis of the SAP ecosystem, new business opportunities can quickly arise for them by supplementing their own offerings and services with partner solutions.
In this specific example, a company from the logistics sector wanted to optimize its pallet processing. They were looking for a neutral platform to display and handle dedicated, collaborative processes online.
The essential point is that this involves the exchange of non-critical data without a company having to expose its protected IT infrastructure to the outside world.
The SAP-Hana-based iRetPlat (integrated Returnable System Platform) for returnable transport packaging from iLog integrated Logistics Platform provided the right tool for this.
The platform is a good illustration of how web-based collaboration for specific business processes, in this case in the retail and logistics industry, can be presented in a functionally interactive way in practice.
In turn, concrete insights can be gained from this, beyond the functional benefits of the platform, about what secure system architectures and data structures must look like and what standards must be observed to ensure that each individual user is provided with precisely the data and functions to which only he or she is permitted to have access in real time.
Classic returnable transport packaging is Euro pallets, mesh pallets, containers or plastic containers. It is in the nature of the concept that these are used successively by many trading partners in mutual exchange.
On the platform, the companies involved in this exchange process can book such packaging on a piece-by-piece basis. Where pallet slips are otherwise acknowledged and countersigned at the ramp, transport packaging is booked online on the platform bilaterally via smartphone, tablet or PC. All that is needed is an Internet browser or Fiori app, an Internet connection, and access to the platform.
The advantage for the manufacturer is that he has greater transparency over his flow of goods, can carry out inventory inquiries in real time, accelerate processes and thus minimize his transaction costs overall. Carriers, in turn, avoid empty runs by balancing their accounts via clearing procedures.
Successful implementation of the business idea is guaranteed by the partners involved for software, hardware and defined standards: SAP, FIS-iLog, FIS-ASP for operating the hardware, and GS1 Germany, which defines standards worldwide and ensures a common language between companies (e.g. EAN barcode or SSCC/NVE).
The solution runs entirely on Hana in the FIS ASP data center. In view of the constantly increasing volume of data, companies can hardly avoid the use of modern databases if they want to continue to work with their business data with high performance.
New business channels and predictive planning are only made possible in part by the processing of mass data. The use of the platform therefore not only makes the transport flows more transparent for the respective players, but new analytics and predictive methods can also be used with Hana and new insights can be generated from the service as a result.
