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ThomasKlemm
Advisor
Advisor
4,441


Supply chain planning involves navigating complex networks with billions of nodes, demanding significant computing power. With the introduction of SAP HANA Cloud, businesses can overcome hardware limitations and unlock a world of possibilities for their planning processes. SAP HANA Cloud eliminates bottlenecks, empowering customers with faster decision-making capabilities, globally optimized planning options, and an expanded supply chain network. It enables agile planning, resilient growth, and ensures business continuity even amidst widespread supply chain disruptions.


In Q3, 2022, we proudly announced the availability of the 'planning booster' - SAP IBP on SAP HANA Cloud. This monumental development allows SAP IBP to leverage the power of SAP HANA Cloud, transforming its infrastructure scalability. With this move, businesses can embrace a fully elastic and self-adjusting cloud infrastructure, boosting the peak processing capacity of SAP IBP to new heights.


Currently, approximately 10% of the SAP IBP customer base is running on SAP HANA Cloud.



Consistency and Scalability: SAP IBP on SAP HANA Cloud


While embracing the power of SAP IBP on SAP HANA Cloud, it is important to understand that the essence of IBP remains unchanged. The code, features, and functionalities that have made SAP IBP a trusted planning solution are preserved. Functionally, there is no difference— everything our customers do and see within the system remains the same.


The focus of the transition to SAP HANA Cloud is on enhancing scalability and performance, revolutionizing the technical infrastructure without altering the user-facing aspects of the system.


The sole difference lies in the remarkable scalability that SAP IBP on SAP HANA Cloud offers. By leveraging the elasticity of the cloud environment, businesses gain unparalleled flexibility and the ability to accommodate ever-growing data volumes and complex planning scenarios. The system expands to meet the needs of businesses, providing the infrastructure to support their evolving requirements seamlessly.



Exploring Elasticity



Elasticity lies at the heart of SAP IBP on SAP HANA Cloud, enabling the system to automatically grow and shrink as needed. This dynamic scaling approach not only reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) but also enhances IBP's scalability for customers grappling with high data volumes.


To achieve this, the solution optimizes the hardware resources by reducing the size of the system’s main database and implementing elastic scale-out. By adding hardware servers called Elastic Compute Nodes (ECNs) and offloading resource-intensive planning jobs to these nodes, the system achieves a balanced workload distribution.


The key to leveraging temporary hardware lies in accurately identifying when it is required and directing the workload accordingly. In SAP IBP, the built-in workload management plays a pivotal role in recognizing the need for additional hardware, dynamically routing tasks to the temporary nodes – automatically and invisible to the user.


For this purpose, SAP IBP workload management uses artificial intelligence to learn resource consumption and duration from previous executions of planning jobs and to optimize hardware allocation for the individual characteristics of the jobs in the next time they run. SAP IBP's compute-intensive algorithms are allocated to hardware with a high CPU count, while memory-intensive planning operations are allocated hardware with more memory. As the system learns with each job execution, it automatically adapts to changing hardware resource requirements as data volumes grow over time.


Users of SAP IBP's built-in job scheduling capabilities also benefit from predictive hardware allocation. SAP IBP analyzes the job schedule and requests additional hardware before it is needed.


By harnessing elasticity, SAP IBP on SAP HANA Cloud empowers businesses to handle diverse planning scenarios efficiently. The system dynamically adapts to changing demands, ensuring optimal performance, resource utilization, and scalability for integrated business planning in the cloud.



Upgrade of the Remaining Customer Base and Ensuring Innovation for All


As we embark on the journey of transitioning the remaining SAP IBP customer base to SAP IBP on SAP HANA Cloud, we are currently in the pilot phase, fine-tuning the upgrade process to ensure a seamless transition for our valued customers with minimal customer effort.


To provide comprehensive guidance, we have outlined the prerequisites and necessary steps in our support note available at https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/3217536.


Rest assured, our commitment to innovation extends to all SAP IBP customers. Regardless of the upgrade timeline, all our customers receive the benefits and advancements offered by SAP IBP on SAP HANA Cloud. Furthermore, we are delighted to announce that SAP IBP on SAP HANA Cloud is offered to our customers at no additional cost, providing them with the enhanced capabilities and performance benefits.


Stay tuned for updates and further communication as we progress through the pilot phase and continue our mission to empower businesses with the innovative capabilities of SAP IBP on SAP HANA Cloud.


To gain a deeper understanding of the upgrade process and the prerequisites involved, we invite you to join our informative webcast titled "Boost IBP Performance with HANA Cloud." It's an excellent opportunity to get a comprehensive overview and have your questions addressed by our experts.