Difference Between “APO” and “SCM”

Happy Friday!

This post is for newbies. I was perusing the many SAP forums this week (just to see what is going on in the world of APO), and I noticed something interesting. Some people have a hard time distinguishing “SCM” from “APO.” Some folks even go so far to say that they are “the same thing.”  So, I want to clarify this: from a purely technical point of view, SCM and APO are definitely not the same thing. APO is only one component of SCM.

I am providing pictures to help clear this up.

Here is a picture of the SCM menu. Please notice that you can access several components on the SCM menu, and APO is only one of them. Take a look:

Based upon this picture, it should be quite clear that SCM and APO are not “the same thing” anymore than “Office” is the same thing as “Excel.”

And to address another point of confusion some folks have, you might also notice that two popular modules Extended Warehouse Management (EWMS) and Supply Network Collaboration(SNC) are not part of APO. They are found within SCM as their own modules alongside APO. I point this out in the picture below:

As long as I am on a roll, I will take this one step further. If you are a newbie, you might be asking just what is inside of APO? Well, if you explode the menu tree, you can see that many of  the familiar modules are right there: DP, SNP, PP/DS, etc. I should acknowledge that APO does have more functionality than what you see at this level. For example, SNP contains several functions that you can’t see here such as optimizer, deployment, transportation load builder and vendor collaboration.

I hope these pictures are useful!