Andreas Weth

Supply Chain Management Software Requirements and mySAP SCM Andreas Weth

Master's Thesis from the year 2005 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology, grade: 1,7, University of Auckland (Faculty of Computing), course: Master of Computing, 83 entries in the bibliography, language: English, comment: This master thesis focuses on supply chain management software and puts a highlight on SAP's SCM solution (which has the highest market share in 2005). The thesis also includes a questionnaire with a qualitative approach to find out what decision makers in the field of SCM software request from SCM software. , abstract: Supply chain management (SCM) offers business benefits but is a difficult concept to master without the right software support. This dissertation is aimed at academic and IT professionals and SCM decision makers or consultants as it provides insights into SCM software and the leading concepts behind it. A qualitative approach was chosen for answering the research questions which focus on general SCM software principles but also enquire benefits, functionalities and the software architecture of SAP's SCM 4.1 solution. In addition to that, the differences between what decision makers request and what mySAP SCM 4.1 offers are addressed with the research questions. To answer these research questions, the structure of the dissertation contains a general introduction to SCM software and includes a SCM software market overview. After this part, one major part of the dissertation contains an analysis of the dominant SCM software solution mySAP SCM (Release 4.1). The examination of mySAP SCM 4.1 focuses first on technological aspects (software architecture, technological platform and programming language) before the business benefits and functionalities of this SCM software are examined. After that, the functionalities, business benefits and the architecture of mySAP SCM 4.1 are compared with the SCM software requirements obtained from ten SCM professionals from different industries (automotive, logist