SAP’s DDMRP Strategy

At the 2017 Sapphire Now Event,   SAP shared details of its DDMRP development program.

SAP has been a supporter of the Demand Driven Operating Model for some time,  and we have been engaged with the Demand Driven Institute,  and with many of our customers who are also embarking on this journey.      The market evolution that we are seeing in supply chain management towards greater demand volatility,  more frequent and shorter product lifecycles,  and constrained supply  (often networked,  outsourced,  offshore).   These factors have led SAP towards a new generation supply chain planning and execution paradigm,  based on visibility,  analytics, collaboration, and realtime execution,  and the demand-driven operating model fits in very well as one piece of this solution.

SAP has a comprehensive strategy to support DDMRP,  both in the cloud-based Integrated Business Planning environment (IBP), as well as in S/4 HANA, SAP’s next generation  ERP solution.       On the IBP side,  the first release  will be available very soon,  through a solution jointly offered with our partner, Camelot ITlab.   Over the course of the next few quarters,  SAP will be further extending this solution to offer the full DDMRP capability natively with IBP for inventory, and IBP for response and supply.

See the attached link,  from Franz Hero, SVP and Head of SAP Digital SCM Development at SAP, SE, discussing the initial IBP release.      https://www.kaltura.com/tiny/yr6m0

In SAP S/4 HANA, SAP is also introducing DDMRP support in our upcoming releases, both in the cloud, and on-premise.   This will evolve in the direction of full realtime support for demand-driven order generation and execution.

The SAP vision for DDMRP therefore is a comprehensive approach, spanning planning and execution,   which we we believe will deliver significant improvements to our customers in customer service, working capital, and overall responsiveness to their customers.