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After almost one year and a half of being part of the implementation and later steering the development of the long term planning solution, probably due to the good results achieved, my quick learning capabilities and my good relation with the business counterpart i was invited to step up and become Solution Architect for the Supply Chain.

As Solution Architect i’m responsible for new business models implementation over the Application landscape. Besides i was asked to improve the existing functionality of the several applications in order to bettre serve business needs.

The SC landscape is basically composed of a Demand forecasting environment based on thh I2 DMAN solution, and inventory optimizer application also from I2,  two Supply planning environments (one with focus on short term operations with weekly cycles and the other with a focus on long term procurement and strategy) and two scheduling and promise applications ( I2 Factory planner for the locations with make to stock products and SAP APO PP/DS for the make to order location) running locally on the factories. Additionally APO DP is also implemented to support the global and regional sales allocation process.

During the period at this role i can distinguish two phases. During the first year the focus was simplification and tuning of the platform to achieve better performance and business satisfaction. Later the focus was downsizing and trimming of the platform to the essential functions in order to cut costs.

The role provide me the chance to extend my understanding of SCM from my original focus on Capacity and Long term planning and become familiar with other processes and business models.

I joined Qimonda AG It department on January 2006. The company was starting a project to replace the entire supply chain landscape of legacy processes  and applications by a industry standards. The selected platform was I2 SCM solutions and i joined the team responsible for implementing the long term , Sales and Operation supply chain planning solution that would support the monthly VRFC  (volume rolling forecast) process.

The solution was based on a global model of the company supply chain and a linear solver to plan and optimize the supply over 18months, having as inputs the demand and capacity forecast, product information and parameters and a set of guidelines (objectives)

This objectives are extremely important and define the business model of the company.  Also, due to the nature of the linear solver (objectives are optimized sequentially) the selection and correctly tuning of them has major impact of the final plan. As example , if we would set ‘minimize stock’ as top priority , most likely nothing would be produced because usually there is no demand for low quality products that are co-products of the high grade stock and always cause stock.

This understanding of the solver/model/objective behaviour was my task on the project team. While the rest of the team was focuses on the final model,  i was simulating with a smaller model and testing different setups.  it was a hands on training as no coaching was provided.  Looking at unexpected results and finding what was the cause for it was my daily work , to which my strong analytical capacities were extremely helpful.

Furthermore, and in order to help my analysis i created the backbone of the reporting and analysis platform. The end user was always very important for me and  i trained the end users on technics and processes to analyse the results  that i had developed.

During the project, as i was the person that best understood the behavior of the solver and could predict the results, i laso became the bridge between the business community and the technical team, translating the business expectations into design changes/adjustments.

Our project was a success and that contrasted with the other projects of the program, and the difference was not the technical part that was very similar within the program. The reason was the close contact that i had established with the business users that allowed us to make the small adjustments that made a big difference,  a solid analysis platform and technical  that allowed the users to quickly understand the cause of unexpected results.

This great results i achieved, together with the trust relation i developed with the business community led me to my next challenge.