SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain ...
Supply Chain Management Blogs by SAP
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Over the past months, we have been experiencing the pain of how a sudden scarcity of resources or products can impact our lives. That’s why it’s key to have the support of intelligent and agile planning software that anticipates shortages, calculates optimal usage of supplies, and also helps to eliminate waste.
The new release includes key features that will help our customers to stay resilient in these times of uncertainty and will also make their planners’ lives easier by reducing complexity, enabling automation, and providing top-notch analytics capabilities.
Today, October 28, 2022, SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain 2211 has been generally released as planned.
Check out some of the many highlights included in SAP IBP 2211:
Supply and deployment processes now enable more accurate planning by considering shelf life constraints. These constraints include the minimum remaining shelf life requirements of demands, existing stock, and upcoming supply. In case of insufficient supply, the algorithm can automatically plan production, internal distribution, and external receipts with a shelf life.
Shelf life planning helps to meet the minimum remaining shelf life requirements of demand elements, while avoiding expiration of available supply. Less wastage of products by using the appropriate batches can make a positive impact on profitability and sustainability initiatives.
Shelf life data is integrated in real-time from SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA. Multiple data points, including batch level information and additional key figures are now available. This assists planners in analyzing shelf life information within apps like Projected Stock and other apps, enabling better and more informed decisions.
With telescopic planning, the optimization algorithm used for operational supply planning can now plan on different time granularities. It’s possible to have a granular view (e.g. days) initially and then extend the granularity to weeks and months in later periods of the planning horizon.
Enabling these telescopic buckets over the horizon reduces the total number of buckets for the optimizer, simplifying the complexity and solve time of the planning run while still providing accurate results.
Planning the short-term horizon in daily buckets provides a detailed plan which can be passed for execution in ERP systems. Telescopic planning allows for planning in daily, weekly, and monthly periods for the complete horizon simultaneously.
Using telescoping optimization helps to reduce the runtime of the optimizer and allows for longer planning horizons, enabling tactical planning with order level granularity.
Planners can put focus on the available planning data by defining attribute-based or value-based filters. The attributes in the planning view can then be sorted alphabetically or according to custom sorting rules. However, to be able to focus on the planning combinations that really require attention, it’s helpful to display the combinations with the highest or lowest key figure values at the top of the planning view.
With only a few clicks, planners can now define sorting rules to show, for example, top selling products, resources with low capacity, or the products with the lowest service level at the top of the planning view and trigger follow-up actions immediately.
We now deliver a mission in the SAP Discovery Center that shows you how to extend the SAP IPB forecasting capabilities by using a custom algorithm. The mission offers step-by-step guidance on how to implement a Prophet-based forecasting algorithm built in SAP Data Intelligence. SAP Data Intelligence is part of the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). The data exchange between SAP IBP and the custom system happens through a new OData service.
You will learn how the well-known Facebook Prophet algorithm can be tightly integrated with the forecasting processes of SAP IBP.
Rule-based master data maintenance is an easy way of enhancing your data set using its known elements. It allows you to set default values based on other master data, create new data, and a lot more. Let’s assume that you have a location product master data type in your configuration model, which contains location product entries in the delivery center. As your business expands, you start using other delivery centers and want to create equivalent entries to the existing ones. To automate the creation process, you can now set up a rule profile in the Manage Rules for Master Data Maintenance app.
Using rules to maintain your master data reduces the burden of repeatedly making manual adjustments and increases the quality of your data at the same time.
Automated master data maintenance processes also help to significantly reduce integration efforts. You can now maintain large volumes of master data based on rules directly in SAP IBP without using an external system.
Leveraging the best-in-class analysis and visualization capabilities of SAP Analytics Cloud, the new Manage Analytics Stories app allows SAP IBP users to create powerful and user-friendly visualizations to complement the planning capabilities of SAP IBP.
The improved flexibility and visual design help to support reporting directly within SAP IBP while immediately analyzing the results of planning runs and adjustments. Analytics stories provide a consistent reporting experience across SAP applications, including SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors, etc.