Overview of Material Management in SAP (ERP)

This session was conducted by Operations and Supply Chain Management department as a part of Materials Management course. The speaker for the session was Mr. Narendra Sharma, AGM – L&T Hydrocarbon, Mumbai. The objective of this session was to make us understand SAP (Systems, Applications, Products) i.e. role and benefits of SAP.

Introduction of  Mr. Narendra Sharma :

Mr. Narendra Sharma is  a graduate in Industrial Engineering and has completed his graduation from Indian Institute of Industrial Engineering, Navi Mumbai in 2006. He has an experience of around 21 years in the fields of Project Management, Customer Relationship Management, Sales and Marketing, Procurement & Vendor Development, Planning and Material Planning. Currently he is the AGM of L&T Hydrocarbons, Mumbai.

About the session :

Mr. Sharma briefed the students about SAP and also about its origin. He mentioned that the current version of SAP that is SAP HANA. He showed a video showing how conventional data recording systems were changed and SAP was introduced.

SAP is used in data processing. It is an integrated software for operations and it has got various modules in it. Sir, mentioned about the following modules : SD (Sales & Distribution), MM (Material Management), PP (Production Planning), QM (Quality Management), CO (Controlling), FI(Financial Accounting) and HCM (Human Capital Management). He explained how major contribution for any employee, is the motivational factor for an employee, therefore the HCM module also plays an important role. He introduced the students with the new features of SAP. Mr. Sharma  mentioned how Artificial Intelligence and RPA is a potential threat to human as it will be able to perform the tasks better than humans in the near future.

Sir, discussed about the SAP MM module. It is one of the significant core modules and supports procurement and inventory management. Various highlights of this module is that it handles direct costs, obsolescence value, indirect cost, inventory carrying costs, material planning, material requirement planning, forward and backward scheduling etc. He gave details about the communication module of SAP, which is a messaging module. The latest update SAP HANA has various dashboards and graphics updates, and it can display the various trends like the purchasing spend trends, supplier requisition trends etc.

Mr. Sharma showed how SAP studies the requirement of an organisation before being implemented. A customized package is given according to the requirements of the organisation. A SAP team comes to the organisation to train the employees on the software. Chances of error by SAP is zero. He mentioned that error can only be caused by data recorded due to human intervention. The session was very interactive and the students were able to understand role and benefits of SAP in ERP systems.                                                    

Report prepared by:

Manjit M Shetye

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