The Inventory Management app regularly loads information related to incoming and outgoing goods and processes it to create insightful reports to help you make smarter business decisions.

Whether it be goods moving out because of a sales order, goods moving from one storage location to another, or goods arriving to replenish inventory, most inventory management processes are managed by an SAP system.

Indicate which of your inventory processes are managed by an SAP standard job and which are managed by an SAP process chain, and then specify the SAP BuinessObjects system your company uses to produce reports. In minutes, your inventory processes are sequentially ordered and ready to be run reliably according to a schedule or, when you say so. A fully automated process is created in the Process Library of Application Lab and an on-demand service is created in the mobile-friendly Self-Service Catalog. You can go back to your process in Application Lab at any time and make changes to your app to keep current with the changes in your business.

Workload Automation runs the SAP jobs and process chains responsible for uploading relevant data about incoming and outgoing goods and processes the incoming and outgoing goods so you always have an accurate count of your products. Finally, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence reports are run to provide you, your co-workers, your managers, and your customers with reports of daily inventory details to work out new strategies, optimize inventory levels, and reduce or avoid stock shortages.

What you need to have

The inventory management app is aimed at organizations that use SAP to manage the flow of goods into and out of inventory. It requires:

  • An SAP environment where you run your SAP standard jobs and process chains to process information about incoming and outgoing goods.
  • An SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform 4.1 Service Pack 1 set up to generate insightful reports.

What you need to do

There are just a couple of things you need to ensure you have downloaded and installed before you launch the wizard:

  • A Workload Automation agent installed on a computer on the same network as your SAP system and SAP BO server. If you have not already installed one, go the Downloads section on the Dashboard page and download it now.
  • The new SAP NetWeaver RFC Library. Support for the classic RFC library ends in March 2016. Download the new SAP NetWeaver RFC library now (SAP note 1025361) and copy it into <AGENT_INSTALL_DIR>/TWS/methods where AGENT_INSTALL_DIR is the installation path of your Workload Automation agent.

Business scenario

Company, eFragrance, sells fragrances online. Without an automated inventory management system, they risk carrying high inventory with the resulting cost of storing the excess goods and, the other extreme, running out of goods and halting sales... not to mention making some customers very unhappy.

eFragrance currently manages various disparate applications and platforms related to the processing of their warehouse goods and creation of relevant reports. One system is used to load the movement of goods, entering and leaving the warehouse, while another system is used to process this information. When all of this processing is complete, then and only then, reports are triggered to provide the company with information about the state of their inventory, daily sales reports, over-stock items and items with slow turnover rates. Trying to coordinate and keep an eye on those processes is high-maintenance and prone to human error. Then, one day, eFragrance discovered the simplicity of the Workload Automation Inventory Management app. Within minutes, they had their very own personalized app that automated all of these processes in the correct sequence and eFragrance can monitor and control the process from a single point of entry.