Bridging planning gaps

In many of today's supply chain planning environments, there are deficiencies that affect the quality and efficiency of planning. In most cases, several isolated applications are involved in the sales & operations planning process; the individual departments each calculate their planning using Excel spreadsheets, but at the same time cooperate too little with each other, i.e. there is a lack of consistent information flows.

As a result, some companies work with outdated sales and financial plans, and changes in demand cannot be taken into account immediately in production planning.

Planning performance often suffers because more time than expected is needed to build the data. Aggregated information cannot be detailed.

Simulations and the comparison of different scenarios are often desired, but prove to be too complex and costly. As a consequence, management makes planning decisions based on outdated data, without considering supply chain constraints and profitability.

Basically, it's about reconciling financial data, demand surveys with plans and data from logistics, production and procurement in one system.

IBP

Integrated Business Planning (IBP) is particularly suitable for companies that already use SAP.

This solution provides real-time planning in an integrated environment and ensures a seamless transition between demand and the plans for logistics, production and procurement that are aligned with it: plans can be created at any granularity and dimension in a single, holistic data model comprising sales, supply chain and financial data.

Functions for simulations and planning scenarios support rapid decision-making processes.

In addition, preconfigured and web-based analysis tools, control functions and an extensive collaboration platform are available. This ensures maximum transparency and efficiency in planning.

The integrated application suite covers all planning processes and can be used fully integrated with SAP ERP systems.

The Supply Chain Control Tower plays a central role: it provides an up-to-date overview of the entire supply chain and delivers meaningful analyses with aggregated or disaggregated planning data and business scorecards.

Linked to exception management tools, it focuses on the important decisions.

Sales & Operations Planning enables the alignment of desired sales and financial targets with production capacity in an integrated planning process.

In addition, it offers extensive functions for scenario modeling and support for internal company collaboration. Demand Planning supports companies with a forecasting process that takes into account not only long-term demand forecasts but also short-term demand signals such as daily fluctuations ("demand sensing").

This module includes statistical forecasting methods, analysis, consensus planning and long-term statistical modeling. With the help of Supply Planning, a multi-level production plan can be generated that matches requirements and production capacities against each other.

Above all, comparisons of different "what if" scenarios in production planning are also possible here.

Other modules include Inventory Planning for setting up an optimal supply chain network and inventory planning, and Response Planning for creating a short- to medium-term delivery plan.

Prioritized and categorized requirements are used to best combine product allocations, schedules and availability commitments (ATP).

Sales & Operations Planning

Sales and operations planning is the focus of the planning process for many companies. If only a simple product-centric approach is taken, the quality of planning suffers because important levels of consideration are often left out.

With a fully integrated business planning approach like IBP, organizations can consistently analyze their various scenarios and the resulting supply chain and financial impacts, and manage their business against these strategic inputs.

Cross-departmental S&OP functions and processes enable inventories, desired service levels, and profitability to be reconciled.

The system helps create transparent business plans for revenue and market share analysis. And faster, agile planning and more accurate forecasting ultimately enable meaningful feedback to customers and subsequently on-time deliveries.

The unified data model supports real-time tactical and operational planning at all levels of aggregation and dimensions such as demand, supply, and supply chain.

Interactive simulation and scenario analysis uses the consistent data model to make rapid decisions to balance supply and demand.

Integrated enterprise collaboration capabilities (SAP JAM) enable end-to-end planning and collaborative decision making that involves all decision makers across the organization.

With the fast Hana in-memory technology, even very large planning models and demand forecasts can be created in a very short time.

In addition, on-premise applications can be outsourced to the IBP Cloud.
Above all, the end users benefit from the fact that Microsoft Excel has been taken into account as the most common analysis tool in the companies: Excel can be used throughout IBP as the standard analysis tool.

This provides a familiar application environment that can be implemented without much training.

Roadmap and implementation consulting

Users can gradually add individual modules of SAP IBP, but a precise needs analysis and a roadmap for implementation are recommended. Consulting companies can become a valuable sparring partner here.

In this way, entry scenarios and a roadmap can then be developed on the basis of a business assessment. This should take into account the goals, development potentials, but also possible changes in the business model, as well as scenarios and cost-benefit analyses.

It's about decisions on whether and to what extent to use the cloud.

A short-term feasibility analysis, in which a selection of the customer's key figures, planning views and analyses are mapped in an SAP IBP prototype, has also proven helpful.

This allows planning processes to be quickly verified as part of a business blueprint.

IT departments, which are often stretched to the limits of their capacity, can also seek external support for rapid implementation and during ongoing operations, for example for the migration strategy, data migration, design of interfaces and support for users and application management.