BW-integrated planning instead of Excel

Rittal owes its market success to the development of innovative products in the areas of enclosures, power distribution, climate control and IT infrastructure, including software.

Rittal is meeting the challenges of digital transformation with a digitization strategy that aims to automate and network process chains and thus reduce throughput times. It is based on an integrated IT landscape with SAP ERP at its core, SAP Business Warehouse (BW) for data analysis and SAP-based Industry 4.0 solutions from Orbis for production and intralogistics.

Agile digital and mobile processes are also highly important in sales. Annual sales planning is an important building block.

"By introducing an integrated planning application based on SAP, we have taken another important step forward on our path to digitizing processes in sales"

says Lukas Schulte, Business Development Manager at Rittal.

Now, planning for the following year can be consistently IT-supported, standardized throughout the company and thus carried out even more transparently.

"The new planning tool uses the functions of SAP BW Integrated Planning (SAP BW IP) and, thanks to SAP Lumira 2.0, is equipped with a user-friendly input interface in Rittal's corporate design"

emphasizes Lukas Schulte.

The tool was developed in close cooperation with Orbis, which is also responsible for the implementation and rollout of the application and created the necessary data model including queries for data queries in SAP BW.

The planning application, which is fully integrated into SAP BW, is in use internationally at Rittal. The benefits of IT-supported sales planning became apparent shortly after going live.

The software enables an end-to-end planning process in which the various user levels have live access to all planning data.

BW IP distributes the planning data automatically via workflow to the responsible user levels. In addition, an algorithm segments the respective planning data into different categories before the start of a planning cycle. The relevant key figures and the desired aggregation levels are selected by mouse click in the navigation area.

"To facilitate the work of the users, necessary planning data is determined by a retrograde calculation. These figures form the basis for our planning"

explains Ina Hanel, BI specialist at the Friedhelm Loh Group.

Fine-granular planned/actual comparisons

At the touch of a button, specific values and subtotals can be shown or hidden as required. The plan figures entered or changed at any aggregation level are automatically distributed top-down to the level with the finest granularity.

There are several planning versions that reflect the different sales levels at Rittal. From an organizational point of view, the annual planning is divided into diverse subcycles.

In practice, this looks like that the first planning cycle is carried out first. As soon as this is finished, the data is frozen as part of a freeze process and at the same time copied as preset values into the plan version for the next cycle.

The next subplanning process is then carried out on this basis. The freeze process allows the comparison of individual plan versions and creates transparency, as every change to the original planning can be traced without gaps.

It also enables effective and fine-granular planned/actual reporting of forecast, planned and actual sales figures at a wide variety of levels.

The BI tool fits seamlessly into Rittal's SAP landscape. Therefore, the result of the sales planning could be integrated into various SAP systems at Rittal in the required form and granularity and also made available to Controlling for planning via SAP BW.

The controllers can evaluate the plan and forecast figures according to their own criteria. The planning of new projects takes place in a grid, the structure of which is built automatically as soon as the necessary information has been entered. Lead and project data from the CRM system used can also be used.

An administrator cockpit serves as the control center. Here, power users from the business department and BW administrators from the IT organization maintain and manage all parameters that are relevant for planning: Basic parameters such as various calculation logics, the planners' worklists during absences, master data, and the assignment of users to various planning roles.