SAP Business ByDesign Customization Use-Case: Approved Supplier Lists for Medical Device Manufacturer

SAP Business ByDesign Customization Use-Case: Approved Supplier Lists for Medical Device Manufacturer - A Blog by FMT Consultants.

"While SAP Business ByDesign has an extraordinary array of out-of-the-box functionality in both breadth and depth, there will always be customer-specific scenarios and use-cases that are not natively handled entirely through standard functionality. Though most ERP systems allow customization to handle these scenarios, what sets Business ByDesign apart is the ability to quickly and easily create custom functionality that can be an integral part of standard processes.

See also: Customizing SAP Business ByDesign to Your Needs

As an example, we will walk through a use-case that we encountered for a medical device manufacturer. Compliance requirements associated with the manufacture of medical devices created the need to manage the procurement of materials and services used in the manufacturing process. Materials used in the manufacture of the devices and the services from third parties involved in the manufacturing process needed to be regulated to ensure that only approved suppliers could supply approved products.

Note that this is intended to provide an example of one approach used to fulfill requirements – your circumstances may be different, and variations to this process are definitely possible.

Before the creation of the customization, this data was managed in Excel and through strict oversight by employees involved in the manufacturing and purchasing processes. Despite this, with any process reliant on human input for validation, the possibility for human error occurs. To greatly reduce the likelihood of errors, the company wanted to utilize SAP Business ByDesign to manage the procurement and manufacturing processes.

The customization contains a custom Approved Supplier List Business Object to store and manage the custom data, an extension to the standard Purchase Order Business Object to execute the validation and store the result, an XML Integration to allow mass-data load and maintenance of the custom functionality and the associated user interface components.

Within this blog, I’ll include “How It Works” tips to provide information on how the functionality is actually created."