Agile, simple, transparent

Supply chains and economic relationships have long become increasingly complex, and related vulnerabilities and problems have become apparent since Corona at the latest. Companies must and want to be able to react more agilely to problems again, evaluate alternative strategies and create transparency beyond their own four walls. SAP responded to this several years ago and is adapting itself and its offerings.

Not only is the technological journey to the cloud one of the big innovation themes, but the accompanying faster innovation cycles, more user-friendly environments, and easier adoption of the software show big differences. Modular software helps to build systemic support faster in the most urgent areas and grow into other processes over time. This is just the case in the area of supply chain planning.

Many still know or work with APO (Advanced Planner and Optimizer), a quite powerful software that offers functionalities from sales planning to demand planning to capacity planning - in transactions that are quite useful and comprehensive for power users, but a bit, well, let's say bulky for the average user.

Note: An earlier article in the E-3 March issue stated that APO was expected to be end of life in 2025. Currently, the mainstream maintenance for EHP4 for SAP SCM 7.0 runs until the end of 2027.
SAP's platform for supply chain planning, SAP Integrated Business Planning
or IBP for short.

The cloud-native planning solution offers various user interfaces, which can be designed intuitively and leanly or descend deeply into the functionalities, configuration and algorithms, depending on the role and authorization. From the sales employee, who only wants to enter the requirements of his customers from time to time, to the data scientist, who works with maching-learning algorithms - one platform for all participants. And this across all planning steps and horizons: from strategic sales and operations planning (S&OP) to tactical sales planning (demand planning) and inventory optimization (inventory optimization) to operational supply planning. All supported by smart alerts, analytics and dashboards that contribute to visibility and transparency, as well as simulation capabilities that support the planner as much as possible, highlighting bottlenecks and contributing to targeted problem solving.

And yet, the platform is "mix and match" - many companies start their IBP journey with the S&OP process or start with Demand Planning to improve their forecasting quality. Some are APO users, so they get into the new areas first. However, the platform is back-end agnostic; neither APO nor an SAP S/4 Hana system nor an SAP ECC is needed to use IBP.

There are definitely companies, for example, that have connected third-party ERP systems. This makes it interesting for both existing SAP customers and SAP newcomers. As a global planning instance, it can also be connected to several or different source systems. And SAP also wants to be successful as an integration provider: Preconfigured interfaces facilitate and accelerate the connection of existing systems, not only to APO, ECC and S/4, but also in the direction of BW or financial integration with SAC (SAP Analytics Cloud).

Prominent and most current example: The topic of Synchronized Planning, which harmonizes processes and data across supply chain systems, in the first step and long awaited with the S/4 Hana MP and S (Manufacturing Planning and Scheduling), the new production and detailed planning solution, whereby planning horizons and systems merge. This is enabled for the end user by another innovation, Planner Workspaces, where users can build their own views of alerts, data and planning levels, in the future also across IBP boundaries.

The outward flexibility is also reflected within the system: although a
Cloud solution, there are numerous ways to customize the solution to meet specific requirements, whether that be a complex and multi-level global supply chain or the size of the company.

Last but not least, a change in pricing has made IBP increasingly attractive for small and medium-sized companies as well, at the latest in the past year. And easier? There is more and more support to get started quickly with the platform: the Best Practices (RDS, Rapid Deployment Solutions), which deliver preconfigured processes, content and even integration. There are also more and more consulting solutions that round off the standard functionalities of the cloud solution with industry-specific extensions.

In addition, there is now an increasingly large and very active community. Via web sessions by and with customers, virtual conferences and so-called round tables, users meet and exchange ideas on various topics, which allows companies to learn from each other. Only at the end
September there was such a round table for German-speaking users, where over two days innovations and plans were presented by SAP developments and two companies presented their own experiences and findings with IBP.

Old and bulky was yesterday - with update cycles of four new releases per year and a publicly accessible, comprehensive roadmap for the next two years in each case, SAP with its cloud flagship IBP shows itself in a way that supply chain planning itself should be: transparent, innovative and above all agile.