How Molex Restored Execution Visibility in SAP After Moving Planning to Kinaxis

In Molex’s hybrid landscape, critical materials planned in Kinaxis no longer generated SAP MRP rescheduling exceptions, creating an inability for users to see, let alone resolve, these exceptions within SAP. Already using GIB Operations to manage and execute daily supply chain decisions, Molex worked with us to bring externally generated planning exceptions back into SAP so business users could evaluate priorities and take corrective action directly within their existing SAP workflows. As a result, manual coordination and exception noise were reduced, enabling earlier and more consistent decisions across procurement and production. 

The Challenge

For materials planned externally, MRP exception messages - specifically Group 7 rescheduling exceptions - were no longer generated within SAP. These exceptions had historically played a central role in guiding execution decisions related to scheduling adjustments, order prioritization, and corrective action. As a result, end users experienced a loss of in-system visibility into planning-driven priorities. Planning exceptions were available in Kinaxis, but execution accountability remained within SAP, forcing planners and buyers to bridge the gap manually.

This disconnect created several operational challenges:

• Execution teams had to review planning insights outside SAP and then reconcile them against SAP execution data
• Planning-driven rescheduling signals were not consistently reflected in execution workflows
• High exception volumes made it difficult to distinguish urgent issues from background noise
• The absence of governance and a shared execution context increased the risk of delayed or inconsistent corrective action

Although only a subset of materials was affected, the operational impact was disproportionate due to the criticality and volume of those materials.

Constraints and Considerations

The solution approach to address this gap needed to satisfy several constraints:

• System roles needed to remain clear: Kinaxis would continue to serve as the system of insight for planning exceptions, while SAP would remain the system of record for execution.

• SAP clean core principles had to be preserved: Reintroducing planning logic into SAP or modifying standard MRP behavior was not acceptable.

• Business users required context, not raw alerts: Simply exposing planning exceptions without governance or prioritization risked increasing noise rather than improving outcomes.

• The solution had to scale operationally: Exception volumes were high (upwards of 30,000 per day), and the chosen approach needed to support sustained use without overwhelming users or support teams.

The approach taken introduced externally generated planning exceptions into SAP as decision-support information rather than system-driven instructions. Planning exception calculated in Kinaxis were contextualized and displayed in GIB Operations within the same views planners, buyers, and schedulers use to manage purchase orders, purchase requisitions, production orders, and material availability. This ensured that users could evaluate planning-driven priorities in the context of real execution data, without those exceptions being mistaken for SAP-generated MRP messages or proposals.

Using GIB Operations, business users were able to evaluate planning exceptions and take action directly within SAP. These actions included rescheduling purchase orders and purchase requisitions (both individually and in mass) based on external planning recommendations, converting purchase requisitions to purchase orders, and reviewing related production orders and material context to understand downstream impact before acting. In addition, users could track which planning exceptions had already been reviewed, helping teams prioritize work and avoid repeated evaluation of the same signals.

Operational outcomes

Over time, this solution approach produced several observable outcomes: