Logistics planning is an indispensable part of supply chain management, whereby companies ensure that everything flows optimally.

A few months ago I did an internship at Amcor, a multinational company responsible for the packaging of many of the packages we consume on a daily basis.

There I discovered a lot of things and learned the importance of planning, raw material control and even the importance of the packaging process.

The programs I used all the time were basically two. Excel to do the planning of the machinery. In the factory there were industrial printers, industrial cutters and an extruder. And SAP, a completely unknown programme for me, I had never used it before and I hardly knew about its possibilities. SAP is a computer programme that falls into the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) category, which stands for enterprise resource planning. The purpose of SAP is to manage in an integrated way the main areas of a large company, such as human resources, financial resources, accounting and administration, logistics and sales.

Thanks to SAP we were able to control the following aspects:

• Raw material supplies.
• Production planning.
• Inventory management.
• Goods delivery planning.
• Real time information for decision making.

One of the functionalities offered by SAP, specifically with its MM and WM modules, is the control of incoming and outgoing goods with records of all movements made and quantified monetarily, optimisation of warehouse space, detecting items with low turnover and controlling shrinkage, improving the level of customer service by reducing stock breakages.

In short, SAP provides software products and services to solve business problems arising from the global competitive environment, the development of customer satisfaction strategies, the needs for technological innovation, quality processes and continuous improvement, as well as compliance with legal regulations imposed by governmental institutions. In turn, SAP serves to provide information. It feeds on the data that is uploaded and processed within an environment, and then produces useful information that can guide decisions within the environment.

SAP is very broad, thanks to this internship I was lucky enough to learn a small part of this powerful software.