Three-in-a-Box: The collaboration powering Ericsson’s supply chain future

Hans Hallgren:

I'm heading up supply chain management within Ericsson and supply at Ericsson.

Our main products that we deliver is related to mobile systems.

So we have been a part of both defining 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G but also being the main player and the main supplier in those networks globally. My name is Kamish Mirza.

I am responsible for IBP transformation on behalf of Group Supply. We are operating and have customers in more than a couple of hundred countries and all the customers are unique in the way they're building their networks and when managing a supply chain with so many different customers but also utilizing technology in the forefront, you are always on the boundaries for what is possible from a technology perspective. So the vision of this transformation spreads from the demand, supply, inventory, S&OP, all integrated into one world-class platform. What we tried to fix with implementing IBP was to have a common integrated capability platform because we have a history of building capabilities in silos, very fragmented, and it's not efficient and we don't have a common master data model or integration setup. So this was really making it more efficient, streamlined, also preparing for, you know, new technologies like AI usage and machine learning and so on..

We need to digitalize ourselves.

We have been working very much in silos with a lot of manual handovers.

We have worked in Excel spreadsheets for many many years.

Of course we have tried to digitalize in small steps but what I'm expecting now from us implementing integrated business planning is that we become more digitalized, more proactive rather than reactive and faster to execution.

Ericsson, before going to Infosys and SAP, IBP, we develop in-house, a solution, is using machine learning to help us to improve our demand forecasting process. It is mainly aiming to our market areas. So it is not value centrally like in my team, but is used to build the bottom up forecast.

My personal expectation is that we will take the lessons learned while we and how we did in our in-house development, but we are not there yet to use machine learning as to replace this one.

The journey started to find the best partner for us to lead this transformation. We had two choices to find a partner who could implement itself or find a software company and a partner who actually has capabilities in driving transformation.

We chose the latter.

SAP then was chosen as the choice of the software for IBP and after almost a year of thorough sourcing processes, we identified Infosys as a partner.

One of the main reasons why we choose this setup was we have SAP as our core system and getting SAP in for our IBP solution is of course a benefit for us already having SAP as the core system.

Then Infosys provided a very good option for us for how to integrate this with Ericsson.

When we look at the benefits we are targeting I would say that one of course is to have more accuracy within the demand plan have a better control and also be more efficient how we get the demand planning in place. And then of course the speed and to be very responsive to customer demands.

Go-live 1 we will have in our forecasting solution we have the input coming from our internal system and the input coming from SAP IBP.

So then the people the forecaster is able to choose or to see which one is the ones that we should use.

And my expectation is that SAP IBP, we will have a higher forecast accuracy than what we have done in-house. At Infosys our partnership with SAP is built on deep collaboration and shared innovation.

Infosys is playing the role of transforming the people from their as-is status to the to-be status, which means leveraging the new ways of working and the technology which is available as the latest and the greatest. Across industries we co-develop solutions to help clients unlock data value and drive intelligent automation.

Along with SAP we are shaping the next generation of enterprise transformation. The Ericsson implementation of IBP is a rock star achievement for supply chain.

t really sets the grounds and the baseline for how other customers can implement IBP and supply chain and giving them the new capabilities of demand planning, supply chain, resilience and be forward leaning for transformation for the future.

What I think has been key for the success of this is first of all partnering up with the right company here and I think it has been great.

It's my first experience working with Infosys and I think it's been a very pleasant experience, a very good one and always very supportive, always thinking how could we overcome very tricky requirements that we have brought to the table. And with Infosys, we've gotten a lot of guidance on how to work with data and how to work with data governance, for example, as well as with SAP.

They've had a lot of influence into how we should work with these type of areas.

When it comes to transformation, I think there's a maturity journey for us within the company to work more integrated, work more with planning in an integrated fashion.

Infosys comes with its best practice approach, of course, and influences us with that. They guide us in terms of the overall vision in terms of how we want to deploy things.

We start in terms of looking at the current state of data. For example, the phases which we are working on, Infosys has started working with us in looking into the data quality even before we start the detailed design. So that’s basically what Infosys brings on the table.

With SAP, and we call it as a three in a box model with SAP, Infosys, and Ericsson.

Right from the beginning you felt like, and it was mentioned by Ericsson as well, they want to have three in a box and that's how it worked right from the beginning, SAP, Infosys, Ericsson working together.

And there’s never been any competition. I see Ericsson, Infosys and SAP as a triangle.

Everybody else says it as a three in a box. But from my perspective, As triangles each corners are connected, we were very connected since the beginning and very collaborative. We try to understand each other.

We try to put on the choose of any other family member in this case, and so far is working very good. We are aligning. We are listening and we are moving forward as a family.