What companies do to strengthen their competitive position permanently, is to optimize the material flow throughout the supply chain in addition to an error free and efficient production environment. Blue Harbors satisfied this requirement using a full automated replenishment solution for external procured materials based on standard SAP ERP. We extended the pull principle Bosch […]
Reengineering Your Logistics Processes: Packing, Loading, Transportation and Shipping
When the Blue Harbors team is asked to connect a customer’s SAP system to carriers such as FedEx and UPS, the project often kicks off without much drama. We start working with the carriers to get the accounts established; we customize SAP and load the necessary mapping rules to support web services; and so on. […]
List of Transportation Organizations that Support Web Services or EDI Communication
There is an ever growing list of carriers, transportation companies, freight brokers and forwarders, and even government agencies that facilitate shipping by supporting electronic communication. The depth of services supported varies from carrier to carrier, but most have the following capabilities:
Automating XSI Carrier Setup
One of the more tedious aspects to configuring XSI is setting up each carrier (Express Delivery Company) in the XSI Cockpit (VTRC). UPS and Fedex used to provide a mechanism for loading much of the data via SAP Business Connector (see http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index?rid=/library/uuid/1b17c690-0201-0010-17b1-a362e172a094), however this is no longer supported by either carrier or by SAP.
How to Stop Carrier Changes from Impacting Your SAP Shipping Functionality
From time to time parcel carriers such as FedEx and UPS update the format of their shipping labels. The FedEx notices below may look familiar. This puts pressure on you to vigilantly follow pending changes from your Carriers and stay on top of implementing updates in your system. Depending on type of shipping solution deployed […]
SAP HANA & The Amazon Cloud (AWS EC2)
With an unprecedented display of transparency, SAP recently announced (Sapphire Orlando) that it would make SAP HANA instances available to developers in Amazon Cloud (AWS EC2). You can check out the official announcement on SAP’s “Experience SAP HANA” site. Getting your own HANA sandbox up and running is relatively straight forward, particularly if you already have an AWS account. There are also a couple of handy tutorials to get you started. Check out the developer guide HERE.
Time-Phased Planning in CBP and MRP
If a vendor always delivers a material on a particular day of the week, it makes sense to plan this material according to the same cycle in which it is delivered. Time-Phased Planning is an ideal solution for this scenario. Materials that are planned using the time-phased planning technique are provided with an MRP date in […]
Blue Harbor’s New SAP Cloud Shipping Solution Highlights
We are currently building a cloud-based SAP shipping solution. Here’s Matt Langford’s quick overview of the upcoming solution: The SAP Cloud Shipping Solution is similar to our existing SAP Express Ship Solution, except the web service mapping is hosted and maintained by Blue Harbors “in the cloud”. This eliminates the need to do any mapping […]
What Is SAP HANA?
SAP’s High-Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA) exploits the advantages of In-Memory Computing that allows the processing of massive quantities of real time data in the main memory of the server to provide immediate results from analyses and transactions by combining SAP software components optimized on hardware provided and delivered by SAP leading hardware partners. SAP HANA […]
ABAP Code For Sending XML Messages via HTTP / HTTPS
The following ABAP function module source code is for a generic HTTP client. It allows you to send XML messages in any format via HTTP/HTTPS, with just a few mapping table entries. Blue Harbors uses this client with Express Ship Cloud Solution.