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Introduction

Driver-based planning is intended to support you in integrating risks and opportunities into your periodic demand planning cycle. Of cause, you can easily just adjust your planned sales quantities manually in the planning interface; instead, Driver-based planning captures important business events with their qualitative and quantitative information in a structured way. A central app in the SAP IBP Fiori serves to gather all required information, such as:

  • Maintain risks & opportunities on brand/market/month level

  • Maintain promotions on product/customer/week level

  • Include demand decrease/increase caused by risks & opportunities only if probability is higher than 75%


Further on, you may include or exclude drivers in the planning process by a single click

 

Driver-based Planning

Driver Based Planning captures business events with their qualitative and quantitative information to drive supply chain plans. Examples of Business Drivers include:

  • Risks and Opportunities are granular events with impact on business. Risks are Business Downsides or Vulnerabilities ; Opportunities are Upsides or Chances.

  • Assumption is a baseline driver for capturing the business activity e.g. Market Assumptions, Competitor Assumption, Growth Assumption, etc.


Below chart from SAP demonstrates how drivers can be included into the demand planning process:


Demand Planning with Drivers


Source: SAP

 

One might ask the obvious question “Why should we use Driver-based Planning when we are planning with promotions already?”. The question is very valid, but the concept of SAP for a differentiation is very clear:

  1. The business purpose of Driver-based Planning is fundamentally different to Promotion Planning. While with Driver-based Planning you would like to predict market tendencies, often without relation to specific customers, you import promotions from sales department, created by sales professionals based on their market and customer knowledge.

  2. The focus of Promotion Planning is more on integration of externally generated promotions (e.g. from SAP CRM or Salesforce) and the disaggregation of promotion data to the demand planning level (eventually running a location split). Nevertheless you can create promotions manually in SAP IBP.

  3. The forecast model app includes a feature for Promotion Sales Lift Elimination as a pre-processing step. Planning with drivers is done manually.

  4. It is possible nevertheless to import opportunities from an external CRM system via CPI or flat file and include them into the demand planning cycle.


 

Technical Settings

To enable Driver-based Planning in the planning area you will need to create specific Master Data Types, Planning Levels and Key Figures.

  • Master Data Types:

    • RISKOPP (Risk or Opportunity) with attribute ROPID as key

    • ROPTYPE (Driver type) with ROPTYPEID as key

    • PRIORITY (Driver priority) with PRIORITYID as key

    • ASSUMPTIONCATEGORY (assumption category for the driver, for example, competition, market growth, weather, or others) with ASSUMPTIONCATID as key



  • Attributes:

    • Here we stress the attribute INCLUDEINPLAN (Include in Plan) which is assigned to the master data type RISKOPP: this attribute is used in the key figure calculation for the CONSENSUSCALCROQTY key figure, which enables you to see the effect of the included risks and opportunities to your consensus demand plan.



  • Key Figures:

    • ROAGGSLSQTY: This is the key figure for which you enter the value for the risk or opportunity in the Driver-Based Planning app.

    • ROCALCSALESQTY: Used to view the impact of each risk or opportunity at the level of the Consensus Demand Qty key figure. This key figure uses a split factor calculation to calculate the ROAGGSLSQTY key figure at the MTHROPRODLOCCUST planning level.

    • CONSENSUSCALCROQTY: Shows the Consensus Demand Qty key figure considering risks and opportunities that are included in the plan.




 

Creating a Driver Type

In a first step, you are creating a so-called driver type, e.g. “Demand Risks and Opportunities” or “Supply Risks and Opportunities”. In this step you are free to restrict the type to specific planning data by applying a filter, but you can do so as well later in the driver definition.


Driver Type


In the driver type you define the time period for which you expect the driver to take effect for, the planning level on which you define the driver quantity and the key figure for entering the quantity:


Driver Type Settings


 


More Driver Type Settings


 

Creating a Driver

As next step, you define the driver itself with specific information on the Risk / Opportunity type, Plan Inclusion and planning objects:


Creating a Driver 1


 

Of cause, you will need to know the expected uplift or down lift quantity:


Creating a Driver 2


 

As a result you will see the timely disaggregation of the quantity along the periods you have included into the driver definition:


Creating a Driver 3


 

Planning Result in Excel

To display the driver effects, please include the relevant key figures into the Excel Planning View:


Excel Planning View


How to import Opportunities

If you do not want to create the drivers in a manual way, you may alternatively load the opportunities from an external CRM system via CPI or flat file into key figure ROAGGSLSQTY. Important here is that you have a consistent Risk / Opportunity ID as this field serves as a root attribute. You can then use the Driver-based Planning App for convenient manual adjustments.

 

Conclusion

Driver-based Planning is an easy-to-use tool to take market trends into account when executing your sales planning. It can be implemented without major effort and may serve as a complementary tool towards promotion planning.

 
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