Overview

Good process leads to real results. With Supply Chain Solutions, we combine a process-driven approach with action to deliver measurable business value.

So you can be more efficient. Leaner. More agile. So you can free up cash flow. Save money. Deliver smarter.

At Supply Chain Solutions, we marry business process, technology and your company culture to develop strategies and a plan so you can implement business improvements that get near-term and long-term results. Through our Consulting Group, we analyze your supply chain and make recommendations that deliver true business value. See how Supply Chain Solutions works for you.

The services we provide include:

  • Sales & Operational Planning
  • Demand Planning
  • Inventory Optimization
  • Shop floor Optimization
  • Supply Network Balancing
  • Order Fulfillment
  • Allocation Management
  • ERP
  • Quote-to-Cash
  • Procure-to-Pay
  • MRP
  • Logistics
  • Master Data Management

The Process we follow to make a difference at your organization is holistic and field tested. The main steps in the process include:

Assess

A thorough examination of your business strategy and how it links to your supply chain performance gives us a solid foundation from which to base our analysis and outcomes. Detailed data gathering and evaluation of current operational activity enable business modeling and solution development.

Design

Every client is unique and every design is customized to provide you the best solution for your business. Our trained professionals use a variety of supply chain tools combined with real-life experience of designing hundreds of solutions. The result is an innovative but practical approach to your challenge. Our Logistic & Process Design helps you understand that successful supply chain networks are about more than the location. It's about how global suppliers, customers, and products come together to create an efficient logistic and supply chain network. Our in-depth analysis also includes facility optimizations—optimizing operating costs, transportation, and inventory. We start with end demand and work backwards through manufacturing and supply to identify the most logical locations, facility designs and transportation options.

Product distribution needs are combined with existing technology infrastructure to identify the best systems for your supply chain—those that deliver the functionality you need and can be integrated easily with existing enterprise resource planning systems.

Implement

Our design team stays engaged from concept to implementation and beyond, to ongoing operations. This means your project will be delivered on time, on budget, and with sustainable performance. Our implementation involves managing change and onboarding the design and business processes that will enhance the future operation. Program management and its discipline, measurement and constant monitoring will help to ensure flawless execution which can be achieved only through effective management of people, processes and enabling technology. Our goal is nothing less than flawless execution.

Manage

Designing a great solution is just the first step. Aline can also help you put the plan in place, becoming an extension of your team in the implementation and ongoing management of your supply chain. Our commitment to quality assurance and continuous improvement keeps your team and ours focused and effective. It's all about how we work to build a foundation for ongoing success. When you're more nimble as a business, form better relationships with your customers, and achieve better visibility throughout your supply chain—well, that's when we know we've accomplished our goal.

Operate

Adapting to shorter product lifecycles and lead times is a constant challenge. That's why Aline designs and implements better ways to operate within your supply chain whether we are managing your domestic or international business, your inventory or your lean material flow, our solutions provide complete end-to-end logistics management.

From material originating at your supplier to consumption at your production line to delivery to your customers, our supply chain operating tools and experienced operating teams will give you full control of your entire supply chain. And by providing real-time visibility to your inventory, you can reduce inventory carrying costs, improve delivery times, and respond swiftly to market changes.

Improve

While our solutions are designed to deliver results, quickly, our commitment to continuous improvement has no end. Throughout your supply chain transformation we help you continually raise the bar, resulting in ongoing business value. Process-based performance depends on carefully chosen metrics that start with the customer and drive desired results. We help metrics become meaningful while we innovate and improve your supply chain performance.

Sales & Operational Planning

In the current information driven economy era, quality decision making and responsiveness are more important than ever. Trends such as globalisation, product proliferation, channel diversification and market volatility mean that managing the supply chain is no longer a back office responsibility. Today's best in class companies have executives recognise the change in mind-set by making Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) the centre of their Organisation with results of reducing costs, growing top line revenue, and enhancing their value to customers. These leaders are pushing their S&OP process beyond simple demand-matching of supply to an Integrated Business Planning strategies (IBP). The common objective for these executives are to have one plan using a predictive process model that drives priorities and higher performance.

Aline understands that running merely good S&OP is no longer acceptable, because customers have higher expectations for product availability, accuracy and fast delivery. We know that with the spread of new digital channels, on top of existing physical channels, our customers are facing complications knowing where inventory sits and what it will cost to deliver to their customers. To compound these challenges and changes, the supply chain has grown more complex as suppliers operate a more extensive network of suppliers, third-party logistics providers and inventory partners. We appreciate that the level of coordinating all that activity can be an overwhelming challenge.

Our professionals utilise industry knowledge, our sound methodologies and leading practices and have seen improvements in the order of 20% to 50% more accurate forecasts, a 10% to 30% reduction in inventory, a 5% to 15% reduction in manufacturing downtime and a 5% to 10% increase in on-time delivery. We know that these kinds of results can be accomplished through the effective coordination of the different plans from business functions constituting demand and supply. Through our methodology and services we have been able to help our clients implement effective S&OP and IBP processes.

Our services include:

  • Programme and Project Management
  • S&OP and IBP Design and Facilitation
  • Planning Systems Implementation Support

Our professionals understand the five pillars of a successful S&OP and we incorporate the foundations of change management and continuous improvement to standup effective programmes for our clients.

Linked Integrated Parts: Conflicting incentives between functions will become obvious and through the enterprise-view and drive discussions on how to resolve.

Coordinate cross-functional teams: Monthly Demand Supply Meetings: Sales, Marketing, Finance, Manufacturing, Logistics and Inventory teams. Weekly operators, planners and commercial teams.

Clear governance and decision rights: Assigning key decision making roles is critical and allow a company to be responsive and nimble when decision makers can enable quick and timely decision making with an end-to-end view.

Enhanced operational plan stability: Utilizing disciplined schedule requirements for supply and demand plan updates with a threshold of acceptable tolerance for variances between the Forecast vs Plan.

Root-Cause capability: Establishing and encouraging feedback loops for lessons learned and adjustments will allow for the planners to be the controllers of the process to initiate decision making.

We clearly understand the complexities may vary and differ by industry through our experience servicing our clients across all sectors and industries. We tailor our approach to incorporate our industry expertise along with leading practices to ensure that our customers are able to resolve their unique industry demands.

Demand Planning

Effective, accurate and efficient Demand Planning and Management is a key differentiator that separates successful organizations and industry leaders from rest of the pack in their environments. Demand Planning is much more than just capturing the forecast numbers of your target customer base. It includes understanding as an Organization where you are, who you are serving, what you are serving, how you are serving and where you are headed.

It requires effective collaboration and integration of various functions with a company such as Sales/ Marketing, Customer Service, Product Design, Engineering, Order Fulfillment, Manufacturing and Procurement to work closely together with a strong executive oversight to ensure proper alignment of operations with corporate vision. At Aline, we take a holistic view of your organization, your organization, process and system maturity, your industry etc. to design an efficient forecasting solution that rightly fits your needs. The assessment will be performed on various dimensions including:

  • Statistical Forecasting: We assess to what extent can the historical data be leveraged to predict reasonably accurate future demand for various types of fulfillment strategies such as MTS, MTO, BTO, CTO, ATO items depending on your industry. We work with you to suggest and implement various techniques that include data preparation, data capture, data processing, model selection, model evaluation, model tuning, forecast generation and forecast approval and propagation.
  • Forecasting Granularity: Depending on your industry, your organization and your product/sales/market/channel strategy we will work with you to define the right level of forecasting granularity in Product, Customer, Time and any other dimensions that you may deem important for you organization. Too much granularity can lead to wasted effort for no major returns and too high of granularity may not be very useful for your operations. Hence hitting the 'sweet spot' is highly essential to gain maximum returns on the effort.
  • Data Gathering: To accurately predict and position your future demand that aligns with your organization's goals and is feasible at the same time for your operations to fulfill, all of relevant data must be captured, stored and utilized following a structured methodology. Various types of relevant data set includes external and internal sources. External sources consist of Market Trends, Market Outlook, Social Networks, Market Reports, Industry Reviews, Customer Predictions etc. Internal sources include Strategic Vision, NPI, Product Strategy, Catalogue Management, Pricing Strategy, internal analytics, Sales Input, Operations Input, global oversight personnel etc. Aline will closely work with your organization to find the right match from this matrix that accurately fits your needs.
  • Forecasting Process: Key to implementing a successful forecasting culture at your organization lies in adopting a right process that fits into your organization culture, vision and strategy. The process must be inclusive and ensure that appropriate input is provided by the right team at appropriate time in the end to end forecasting cycle. The process will also include executive oversight and ends with S&OP at the end of the cycle.
  • Performance Measurement: A key component of successful adoption of Demand Planning process at any organization involves defining, measuring, tracking and improving the performance of various actors in the end to end supply chain process. Adopting too many measures leads to too much confusion and adopting too few may not be yield desired benefits. Most importantly, adopting the wrong ones may result in organizational resistance. At Aline one of our key strengths is to understand your situation and define the right metrics that not only fit to your vision but also accelerate the rate of transformation.
  • Continuous Improvement: Change does not happen overnight. Neither organizations can realize benefits short-term. Overcoming the 'inertia' to change requires concerted effort from broader organization to realize current drawbacks and improve continuously adopting best practices. This process must then be weaved into the culture of the organization for optimal results. Aline has helped many companies successfully execute extensive Change Management and Continuous Improvement process in many industries. Leveraging from this experience we can help you adopt the right framework to win in the competitive market place.
  • Solution Selection: Right information solution that complements your organization's processes only enhances the pace of change at your organization. Aline has implemented variety of successful Demand Planning solutions based on latest technologies and trends over the past 15 years. Learning your vision, collaborating with you closely we can provide options on adoptable solutions at your Organization that fits your objectives at the same time minimizing costs.

Inventory Optimization

Operating at optimal inventory levels is one of the core principles in complex multi-stage supply chains. Such an environment will ensure efficient fulfillment of your customer demand ensuring both higher service levels and lower inventory costs. At any Organization, various variables contribute towards determining optimal inventory levels. Most common ones include Customer Demand uncertainty, Supply variability, Production operations inefficiency, Capacity shortages/excesses etc. These factors continually are subjected to various degrees of uncertainty and variability, each individual node or combination of nodes in a network. Negative effects of such inefficiency can multiply across the whole supply chain.

Traditional inventory optimization solutions often ignore such holistic picture, focusing mainly on one stage in the network during optimization which leads to an over-buffering of inventory requirements across the supply chain. At Aline we take a comprehensive approach in providing multi-echelon inventory optimization solution at your Organization. Your Company's Supply Chain network is considered in its entirety accounting for multiplication effects of demand variability and supply uncertainty in the network. We will assess the complementary technology that fits to your unique needs in order to provide 'fitting' inventory solution at your Organization.

With the deployment of a multi-echelon inventory optimization solution you can highly profit from:

  • Increasing customer service level through improved fill rates and reduction of stock outs.
  • Reduction in inventory and working capital costs.
  • Higher productivity in planning processes and activities.
  • Decreasing distribution costs through elimination of excess.
  • Multi-echelon inventory optimization
  • Cost-effective postponement strategies
  • Time-phased demand signals
  • SKU rationalization
  • Optimization of all the inventory components, including cycle stock, safety stock, pipeline and pre-build inventory
  • Higher vendor managed inventory (VMI)
  • Development of Just in Time (JIT) strategies
  • Enhanced supplier intelligence to minimize out-of-stock situations
  • Inventory optimization is a very sophisticated but also business-critical topic that requires a profound knowledge of stochastic and real business planning processes. Aline consultants are highly qualified from an academic perspective but also from operational experience in implementing Inventory Optimization solutions. Collaborating closely with you we will also support you in selecting the best tool, integrating it in your current system landscape and aligning it with your current business planning processes by also providing necessary change management support and training.

Shop Floor Optimization

Aline Shop Floor Optimization Services provides all-encompassing advanced manufacturing solutions with practical execution. With over 15 years of experience, we are well-equipped to provide expert onsite consulting, identify opportunities for additive manufacturing, and assess the impact so your business stays on the forefront of manufacturing today and in the future.

Expert Onsite Services: Our Professional Services team brings the expertise to you. We will pinpoint when, where, and how you can integrate additive manufacturing into your operations, and deliver actionable training for your staff.

  • Onsite assessments
  • Opportunity identification
  • Comprehensive operations analysis
  • Management education programs
  • Customized technical training
  • Additive manufacturing consulting

Direct to Manufacturing: Professional Services offers turn-key solutions for the manufacturing floor. Whether you're looking for a small tweak or starting from scratch, we have you covered with a full suite of design and engineering solutions.

  • Design for additive manufacturing
  • Value-added product optimization
  • Manufacturing tooling design
  • Engineering and design consulting

Innovative Manufacturing Solutions: Your needs are unique, the solution should be too. Professional Services offers truly customized manufacturing solutions from prototype to production across a full suite of additive and traditional technologies

  • Research and development
  • Design of experiments (DOE)
  • Materials analysis and specification development.
  • Process specification development

Our Approach:

Fast Focused Deployment: The Professional Services team will help you ramp up quickly and manage the entire process – from ensuring seamless design through production manufacturing and ongoing consultation.

Alignment With Your Work-flow: Our services incorporate operational management for smooth and unified workflows with existing manufacturing processes, including design and engineering.

Enhanced ROI: Aline Direct Manufacturing's decades of experience helps optimize your manufacturing applications. With our guidance, your company will discover new value added opportunities you may not have originally considered that leverage increased efficiencies and expedited time-to-market.

Limitless Creativity: A proven track record of success built on creativity and proactive out-of-the-box solutions puts our professional services above the rest.

Supply Network Balancing

The supply chain is a very important part of the total value chain of a company and a significant source of competitive advantage. Business leaders have come to understand that their supply chain forms the backbone of their business and an enabler for their business strategy. Organizations are moving away from focusing their supply chain efforts on functional excellence to leveraging their supply chain as a strategic capability.

Contemporary trends such as rapidly changing customer preferences, dynamic changes affecting the market place, disruptive technologies transforming the world, continual drive for outsourcing, cost effective sourcing and shop floor execution are driving innovation at majority of the companies in unprecedented pace. The situation in few instances demands a 'do-or-die' approach. In such a vibrant environment filled with many risks how do companies innovate to stay on top?

Leveraging our deep supply chain network optimization and demand supply optimization expertise we can advise companies solve the following challenges:

Supply Chain Network Optimization: The supply chain performance attributes described boils down to four main key supply chain levers:

  • Resource Acquisition: Acquiring and divesting right resources at right quantity at right place at right time. Resources can be production units, warehouses etc.
  • Structural Decision: Realignment of capacity, reduction in echelons in network etc.
  • Operating Policies: Policy decisions basis cost to company view. E.g. production strategy to react to seasonality in demand
  • Operational Efficiency: Efficient execution & control of day to day operations

One of the most important considerations in supply chain and operations is cost. The supply chain network optimization model also focuses in optimizing "cost to serve" considering end to end supply chain cost, while maintaining necessary service level. Hence identifying end-to-end supply chain cost nd cost drivers becomes one of the important considerations in network design exercise.

Demand Supply Balancing & Optimization:

Most companies struggle at putting their cost intensive assets to optimal use, lacking global centralized view of their supply capabilities. This in combination with volatile demand leads to under utilization of asset capacity, procurement of excess raw material, excess storage of semi-finished goods, overstock of unsold finished goods spread across various inventory/warehouse locations and dissatisfied customers because of problems in fulfilling the right product at the right place at the right time. Such an imbalanced sub-optimal approach to demand supply balancing can leave a lasting damage on a company's operational health both short-term and long-term.

By studying the unique nature of your company's history, operational DNA, the culture, existing business operations and your desired strategy and vision, we will work with you to effectively manage your supply chain assets to put to optimal use. We will take a fresh look at:

Procurement Strategy/ Principles: Are your procurement principles aligned with JIT, KANBAN, VMI etc. and at the same time support optimal end-product fulfillment strategies (MTO, MTS, BTO, CTO, ATO etc.)?

We will propose practical adoptable changes to your existing processes ensuring optimal procurement of only needed material, right quantities, at the right time in right percentages from the existing set of suppliers. We will collaborate with you to understand the 'fit' for various principles that relate to procurement policy, procurement calendars, percentage split, VMI at convenient locations, outsourcing of manufacturing, assembly & test, direct fulfillment etc.

Manufacturing Planning & Execution: Companies that just transformed by undergoing mergers, divestitures and expansions recognize multiple synergies across various manufacturing/assembly locations, however unable to do so facing

various obstacles including: lack of global visibility, absence of a centralized demand-supply balancing process & information systems, continuous embrace of silo operating models, absence of energetic drive among various stakeholders to realize efficiencies etc. Working with you closely we will identify such bottlenecks and advise you on the pragmatic strategies and solutions that will tackle these issues. We will assess strategies such as product mix optimization, efficient shop floor planning & execution, real-time visibility between sales & manufacturing, customer centric inventory policy adoption, global demand propagation etc. We will also advise you on adoption of various material flow, product fulfillment strategies that rightly complement your business operational needs.

Optimal Capacity Utilization: Most companies in manufacturing centric industries face varying degree of 'elasticity' in asset utilization - in some instances they realize excess capacity while in others they face excess shortage. Besides, companies fail to optimize the mix of products that they can make on available machines/ capacity lines leading to under utilization of available capacity or excess production of certain group of products etc. We will work you closely to better plan for such cross-plant cross-machine optimization techniques optimizing your production across all of your assets to align with your customer demand.

$ Systems/ Computers icon

Order Fullfillment

Today's Enterprises, despite having technology-enabled procurement systems, frameworks and processes in place, procurement executives continue to face several challenges including: inadequate spend visibility, high savings leakage, maverick spending, disparate procurement processes and systems, unsatisfactory contract management and compliance, high total cost of ownership (TCO) etc. To win in today's highly competitive market place organizations are facing urgent need to successfully navigate these challenges while taking the procurement function to the next level resulting in increased cost savings for the company.

Our Solution:

Delivered in the Cloud, Aline's Spend Management solution is a flexible and scalable platform, which can be deployed rapidly enabling enterprises to enhance savings, reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), and improve supplier performance and compliance measures. Offered on an outcome-based, pay-as-you-go pricing model, Aline provides enterprises with better spend predictability and visibility, while lowering their capital investment outlay by converting capital expenditure (CAPEX) to operational expenditure (OPEX).

Pre-built, and pre-configured with industry best practices, Aline's solution helps companies achieve faster time-to-market and is designed to help companies benefit by way of:

  • Superior sourcing and category excellence
  • Enhanced spend control and visibility across direct and indirect spend categories
  • Improved process standardization and efficiency
  • Best-in-class technology and tools
  • World-class sourcing and procurement services
  • Improved compliance

Supplier Performance Assessment

The current processes to evaluate Supplier Performance and Assessment rely heavily and largely on the annual or semi-annual or periodic assessment of Strategic/ Operational Procurement teams leveraging a combination of subjective and objective assessment scorecards. Such processes hide real problems in effective supplier collaboration. Suppliers are off the hook from day to day poor performance actions including delivering materials late, of poor quality or not meeting the commitment. Such fallouts ultimately affect the customer service or day-to-day operations of the Buyer's organization. Hence it is imperative that the Organizations adopt a holistic Supplier Performance Assessment framework that is reflects every action against the agreed commitment with each of the Suppliers.

Our Solution:

Tightly integrated with enterprise wide ERP and warehousing systems, our Supplier Performance/Assessment solution collects real-time transaction data from these systems and parsing this data with predefined rulesets, the solution calculates real-time performance for each of the suppliers. The solution clearly demonstrates the performance of the supplier over various time periods, highlighting the trends. The solution also matches the real time performance against the intended Strategic Procurement targets and provides a compliance score in multiple dimensions such as - Quality, Quantity, Price, Reliability, Risk etc.

Such a transparent, real-time, data centric assessment not provides organizations with immediate visibility into their Supply Chain problems but also enables them to be more reactive and tackle the problems upfront, eliminating supply chain disruptions. Also it empowers organizations to better negotiate with Suppliers, find alternate suppliers, assess the risk upfront and position for success eliminating risk.

Allocation Management

In today's dynamic fulfillment environment, companies share a common goal of allocating scarce resources effectively to current and projected customer demand in order to maximize revenue, minimize the cost and optimizing the utilization sequence at a machine etc. while satisfying certain constraints including resource availability, customer service levels, back order level, delivery window etc.

The allocation paradigm can span across multiple elements of an end to end supply chain including raw material allocation to semi-finished goods (Critical Component Planning), machine capacity allocation to make the desired product (Capacity & Resource Planning), finished goods inventory allocation to existing customer demand (allocation planning) etc. It can also include logistics network planning for efficient route optimization, carrier optimization (filling trucks with right product-mix), warehouse capacity optimization (filling inventory with right mix of finished goods for optimal customer service) etc.

We helped many companies from companies that house their entire business operations in one single location to global conglomerates optimize allocation of their constrained resources to maximize derived business value resulting in efficient operations. Results included optimizing customer demand fulfillment, efficient machine operation to full capacity making the right product-mix, better use of critical components, right product-mix at customer serving inventory location etc. all maximizing company's revenues by better asset utilization and lower cost and waste.

Our approach includes the following steps:

Analyze: Briefly analyze the key areas of pain points and/or inefficient operational areas that are adversely impacting business operations. We will bring our deep industry expertise and compare your operations with industry best practices in your vertical. We will bench mark the results and work with you to better understand why part.

Propose: Collaborating closely with you we will study in detail the root causes and propose innovative solutions to solve the problem. We present options the pros and cons of each and work with you to narrow down to an option considering costs vs benefits holistically. Sample set of solutions will include Customer Classification/Categorization and respect the preference in end to end supply chain fulfillment/planning, profit optimization considering various costs/constraints, product portfolio simplification/cataloguing, channel/market optimization etc.

Implement: Once option is finalized we will work with you helping you adopt the chosen option. This may require organization and process redesign, implementation of new roles and responsibilities, appropriate information solution design and implementation and necessary support & training. All through this process we will involve various personnel including stakeholders, core team and corresponding key and business users closely involved. Based on the received feedback we will adjust the adopted process accordingly ensuring maximizing adoption.

Transform: Change is not easy and it takes combined organizational energy, ongoing commitment and continued acceptance to change. As part of warranty and continued commitment on our end to ensure your success we will work with you to provide necessary support ensuring ultimate success of the implemented process.

factories and fulfillment centers alike, face a stark choice of which customer orders to fulfill.

Resource Allocation in supply chain management

ERP

SAP HANA:

Guiding you through the rapidly shifting landscape requires an understanding of an organisation's existing capabilities and structure, their challenges, goals and ambitions, and the combined industry and technical expertise to identify, refine and deliver new data and service-based business models. Aline provides the Vision, Strategy, Road-map, Proof of Concept and full SAP HANA Migration Services to help clients find the quickest and simplest ways of moving to SAP S/4HANA. We act as a trusted advisor, partnering with clients to evaluate and drive instant value with SAP HANA. As an end-to-end SAP Service Provider with global capability and global certifications in SAP Hosting, SAP Application Management, SAP Cloud Services and SAP HANA Operations, we help our clients assess the digitisation of products and services, and help them move to the S/4HANA platform without disruption.

With highly experienced SAP HANA teams, plus pre-built testing and demonstration environments, Aline fully supports your move to SAP S/4HANA. We leverage our proven SAP HANA infrastructure, extensive SAP HANA Operations Services and a range of deployment options to give complete flexibility to our clients. Our SAP HANA Services comprise implementation services from requirements gathering to go-live support and continuous business improvement. Our Operations Services are focused on driving business improvements through IT innovation and provide the 'SAP HANA backbone' offering Proof of Concept, Business Suite on HANA, BW on HANA, BO Reporting and SAP HANA infrastructure. Our proven implementation methodology follows the plan-build-run approach with each phase comprising defined work packages, deliverables and quality gates.

SAP Integration:

Our Mission is to achieve the superior customer satisfaction by delivering innovative solutions cost effectively, using sophisticated SAP technology with excellent standards of quality and integrity. When implementing SAP technologies you need a partner that provides a deep-rooted understanding of SAP technology and awareness of industry best practices. Our expert consultants provide customer focused creative solutions to even the most complex SAP challenges by combining comprehensive experience and capabilities.

To ensure we deliver on-time and within budget every time no matter what the challenge, we continually build on our expertise in SAP technology to help our customers achieve their goals effectively and efficiently. Our approach is simple we provide highly-skilled consultants to meet our customers' needs by developing practical business tools, designing innovative strategies, and offering market intelligence specifically for the way our customer's business functions. Whether implementing new SAP technologies or upgrading your system, Aline's consultants have the experience to comprehend end-to-end processes, analyze needs, and provide guidance in order to deliver accelerated results. We exceed our customers' expectations with our seasoned professionals, cost-effective pricing plan, flexible approach, and innovative solutions; while delivering results within or under budget on-time, every time.

SAP Analytics & Business Intelligence:

Let Aline help you improve customer experience and gain competitive advantage with Data Analytics. We continually strive to improve your organization's decision-making capabilities, driven by real-time intelligence. We ensure that everyone from customer service agents to C-level executives has access to the best possible information before they market to customers, adjust inventory and supply chains, or pursue new business strategies.

More than ever, companies need timely, in-depth insights if they are to remain competitive globally. But those insights can only come from better ways of accessing, organizing and interpreting information—in effect, from a "whole business" approach to analytics. Aline's Analytics solutions enable businesses to assess their analytical maturity and effectively utilize data to gain better insight and drive business planning based on statistical methods. Our experts have unique skills and expertise in deploying analytics services and assets that address specific, targeted analytical applications.

Our BI Solutions include: Packaged BI Solutions, Executive Dashboards & Scorecards, Financial Performance Management, Reporting and Business Intelligence, Social Media Analytics, Mobile BI, Text Analytics, Spatial Intelligence

Quote-To-Cash

Our customers often experience challenges with spending the majority of their time and effort firefighting around the order to cash (O2C) process. Substantial manual effort is required to keep the process running smoothly, and significant time is wasted waiting for other departments to provide information and approvals. When issues arise with cash collection, errors are often identified and take considerable effort to correct.

Aline addresses these concerns in the O2C process by allowing you to:

Improve order entry cycle time: Aline helps reduce your manual order entry time, freeing up customer service resources so your team can dedicate more time towards assisting customers with interpersonal interactions.

Increase revenue: By improving the overall efficiency of the O2C process, Aline gives you the opportunity to gain new business and increase revenue that would have otherwise been missed, due to longer lead times.

Decrease customer lead time and improve satisfaction: Aline allows you to decrease your lead time to customers – creating productivity savings in the overall O2C process and improving customer satisfaction.

Procure-to-Pay Solutions for SAP Systems

Streamline the Procure-to-Pay Process with Integrated Process Solutions

The procure-to-pay mega-process that drives your business. Yet often the Procurement and Accounts Payable departments are siloed, working independently and their processes are not optimized to drive the greatest value for the company.

Aline's Accounts Payable solution provides organizations with the ability to streamline the procure-to-pay process in SAP systems. Based on the SAP-Certified Aline Process Tracking System, the solution provides key capabilities that improve the speed, accuracy and transparency of accounts payable processing and built-in integration points with Procurement, Treasury, and Cash Management to improve the overall effectiveness of the procure-to-pay process.

Improve Speed and Accuracy

With automated invoice capture and optimized SAP workflows organizations can use the Aline Accounts Payable solution to improve the speed and accuracy of invoice processing. The solution enables automatic capture and processing of Non-PO invoices, ensuring those invoices go through a similar level of control as PO-based invoices. For PO-based invoices, it automatically validates and matches invoices against PO information. It also provides integration with the Ariba and a Vendor Portal which enables vendors to easily flip POs to invoices and get real-time information on invoice status, significantly reducing the time and effort involved in managing vendor interactions and increasing vendor satisfaction.

Faster, Flexible Approvals

Approvals is one area where the procure-to-pay processes can slow down, as busy users forget to approve invoices in a timely manner. With a Mobile Approvals App and Advanced Approvals on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, the Aline solution enables organizations to improve the speed of approvals, which ensures invoices are paid on time or early to capture vendor discounts.

Better Routing and Exception Handling

Exceptions is another area that can impact the speed and efficiency of invoices processing. Aline uses SAP workflows to route invoices for exception handling, bypassing the AP department entirely, so invoice processing is as efficient as possible.

Better Insight for all Stakeholders

The seamless integration with SAP applications provided by the Aline Accounts Payable solution, ensures that organizations have real-time information about their invoice processing. Whether the organization is using in-house invoice processing or an outsourced processing service, Aline provides the software that organizations need to maintain full control and oversight over their invoice processing and enables organizations to continuously improve processes for faster, more effective processing.

Powerful Reporting and Analytics

Key performance metrics are an essential part of demonstrating the effectiveness of your accounts payable process, yet with manual processing, productivity can be an elusive thing to measure. The Aline Accounts Payable solution ensures that organizations can track processing at a very granular level and measure important productivity areas such as invoice cycle time, invoice capture rate, cost per invoice, and more. With clear metrics, the Accounts Payable team can demonstrate to the Procurement team, the Receiving department, and more how these departments impact the efficiency of the Accounts Payable department and how the teams can work together to optimize processes and deliver real value to the company.

MRP

SAP Business One MRP (Materials Requirements Planning) allows you to define a planning scenario in five easy steps and then predict demand based on its forecasts. This sophisticated module ensures that your company can fulfil demand resulting in satisfied customers. Whether you purchase your inventory in or you manufacture it, SAP Business One MRP module can handle it.

Benefits of Aline helping you implementing SAP Business One MRP key features:

  • Accurately predict demand based on forecasts, allowing you to adjust material planning accordingly
  • The planning wizard guides you through the process of creating planning scenarios in five simple steps. Scenarios can be run for a range of items or item groups, and once executed, the solution produces a detailed recommendation report
  • The recommendation report, planners can automatically select recommended production orders and production orders for automatic creation
  • Pre-defined report templates allow you to create detailed reports quickly and easily

Benefits of Aline implementing SAP Business One MRP key features:

  • Accurately predict demand based on forecasts, allowing you to adjust material planning accordingly
  • The planning wizard guides you through the process of creating planning scenarios in five simple steps. Scenarios can be run for a range of items or item groups, and once executed, the solution produces a detailed recommendation report
  • The recommendation report, planners can automatically select recommended production orders and production orders for automatic creation
  • Pre-defined report templates allow you to create detailed reports quickly and easily

Logistics

As a SAP consulting and project specialist, Aline has specialized in implementing, realizing and optimizing solutions for the logistics function and/or industry and improved company processes along the supply chain with SAP products.

With qualified consultants in the field of logistics, the Customers demand for tailor-made IT solutions that fit to their exact company specific processes that enable them to differentiate themselves from their competition is one of the key differentiators of Aline.

Aline is a company that realizes customer requirements using in the SAP standard practices and through experienced logistics SAP consultants. Our approach is to develop a comprehensive solution in a project that fits your process requirements and enhances it by reducing bottlenecks and solving key problem areas. We thus can achieve process, services and costs advantages for you while orientating the solution completely on the SAP standard.

Aline SAP team has extensive expertise in the areas of intra-logistics, transport management and industry specific requirements for Logistics Service Providers (LSP). The combination of logistics business process, application consulting and implementation/ integration of logistics solutions using SAP ERP and SAP SCM standard software ensures that you have a minimal customized solution which provides better value for money, reduced timelines in transition and real-time access to information about the whereabouts of your material at any given point of time.

Master Data Management

SAP Master Data – Move from delays and errors to speed and accuracy.

Aline provides perfect foundation for perfect SAP master data management via optimizing and automating SAP data management tasks and reduce manual work by:

  • Deploying data upload tools that eliminate manual data entry
  • Implementing workflows that automatically collect data from multiple stakeholders
  • Utilizing smart interfaces that validate data at the point of entry

Customer Master: Customer creation and updates utilize easy-to-use web forms and automated workflows for review and approval. Business users can perform mass updates from within Excel, saving time and reducing errors.

Material Master: Collect material data from multiple business groups and validate at the field level in data entry. Streamline material creation and updates, and receive customized views for each step in the process.

Vendor Master: Authoring web-based forms and workflows with Aline allows business analysts to easily collect and validate vendor data from different business groups such as Sales, Procurement and Finance

Master data is often the bottle neck to starting an order to cash process and can greatly affect your lead times and overall adequacy. Aline can help you improve efficiency for every step in the O2C process (see diagram) including the creation of master data.

tilizing smart interfaces that validate data a

Aline streamlines data collection, data validation and data movement. Implemented with lean iterative cycle times, you can gain quick wins but also remain agile as your business processes evolve. Our lean data management platform allows you to learn and improve your processes quicker, gaining increased efficiency with each cycle.

Business analysts can accelerate process optimizations by having an active role in developing solutions to problems they know best. This approach is possible with Aline rapid deployment capabilities that allow the business to help develop solutions with minimal IT support.

Aline can improve your overall O2C efficiency by optimizing the sub processes. Aline validates and automates data into SAP for order entry, pricing, and mass changes to material and customer records. Additionally, Aline provides governance and workflow around more complicated scenarios such as the data collection for new material and customer records.