Today I am releasing the new add-on PREISS Consulting Advanced BOM Analytics – Supplier to Customer, which I have been developing over the past two years alongside my customer projects. Considerably longer than initially expected.
However, I am very satisfied with the decisions I made and with the result.
The first important decision was to build an integrated package that, in addition to the new usage analysis and new versions of the BOM browser and material analysis, also includes dedicated transactions for source-of-supply analysis and customer-related evaluations. I am also glad that I consistently implemented the supplier and customer context and integrated source-of-supply determination based both on standard purchasing functions and on simulations of MRP (Classic) and MRP Live.
The resulting overview of the entire chain – from suppliers through the company’s own product structures, multi-level and across plants, all the way to customers – should be useful for many applications across industries. I am confident that both beginners and experts will appreciate having this amount of context available either along the BOM structure or alternatively as a material list, with direct navigation to the related transactions.
For example, these transactions would have helped me significantly during my own onboarding into SAP in order to understand how data from different applications is connected. Today, I gladly use them to quickly identify or build sample data.
I am also curious about potential applications in combination with AI tools. In my opinion, the relationships within SAP are nowhere documented with sufficient precision for AI to deliver analyses of comparable quality on its own. Conversely, providing this information across so many objects and relationships in such a dense, precise, and structured form opens up new opportunities for intelligent downstream processing – both for operational and strategic purposes.
One of the most complex aspects was likely the calculation of total quantities in multi-level usage analyses, especially when multiple production versions and alternative BOMs are involved. And of course, there were many, many time-consuming details, for example around special procurement scenarios and source-of-supply determination.
Marketing will certainly not become easier, but AI tools actually help not only with technical implementation, but also with overcoming the hesitation to publish texts and take action at all. I use Gamma for creating presentations, as well as ChatGPT and occasionally Grok for text creation and questions, for example related to the website.
