Time flies and we’ve been very busy working on a wide range of features that will increase flexibility and reduce the complexity of your planning processes.

Today, August 4th, 2021, SAP® Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain 2108 has been generally released as planned.

After a restricted shipment with SAP IBP 2105, the brand new and even better Planner Workspace is now available to all customers.

Check out some of the many highlights included in SAP IBP 2108:

New Planning UI: Planner Workspace

The Planner Workspace provides a unified workspace for planners to complete their business scenarios from a single configurable UI. Users can centrally plan, analyze, and resolve supply chain issues across planning and execution domains. The Planner Workspace is easily changeable and configurable by business users across multiple roles.

There’s a high level of personalization for planner-specific working styles enabled by different layouts and components (such as alerts, web grid). Planners can save and simulate across all components and features like contextual filters can be applied to all components on the screen. Planning efficiency is increased by streamlined navigation from alerts to details and then directly to the required actions.

The Planner Workspaces app now also provides visibility into the combined filters applied between workspace filters and component filters for versions/scenarios, time periods and attribute values. Planners can fix and unfix key figure values and view, run, and schedule application jobs. The Planner Workspace will be a great time-saver for planners to align on decisions and to be able to execute decisions from the same user experience.

Demand: Forecast Decomposition for Forecast Method “Multiple Linear Regression”

Thanks to forecast decomposition using the forecasting algorithm Multiple Linear Regression (MLR), planners now have more transparency regarding the individual drivers of sales. Information about baseline forecast and additional independent forecast variables can be separated. You can set the algorithm to calculate the impact of each selected independent variable on the forecast and, optionally, the ex-post forecast.

For example, it’s now possible to determine how much of your overall forecast is driven by planned promotions or upcoming events.

A streamlined Demand-Driven Replenishment Process: Planning Steps (Steps 1-4) in SAP IBP, and Execution (Step 5) in ERP

You can now leverage SAP IBP for running all 4 planning steps of demand-driven material requirement planning (DDMRP) including supply planning and use the SAP ECC or SAP S/4HANA for the final adjustment of plan and its execution. SAP IBP DDMRP can be used in combination with any SAP ERP landscape.

Supply elements for all location-products can be created and propagated directly in SAP IBP using the DDMRP principles.
SAP IBP DDMRP provides simulation capabilities, supply propagation across network in one run, and more accurate net flow calculations.

Innovations in Response and Supply

Response & Supply: Location Material Substitution Now Supported by Finite Heuristic

Location material substitution now considers substitution scenarios either using the optimizer or the finite heuristic planning algorithm. This enhancement brings many advantages: Substitution master data is available to support discontinuation and mutual substitution scenarios. Material stocks and scrap can be reduced by considering stock and supply use-up in discontinuation and you can optimize material availability by substitution of demands for discontinued materials.

Response & Supply: Calculation of Capacity Consumption at Start of Transportation Activities

OBP applications now enable you to define the consumption policy for transportation resources at the end or the start of a transportation activity. This increased flexibility improves distribution planning results by considering transportation capacity constraints and reduces transportation costs by balancing high transportation demand across multiple days. You can, for example, restrict the total transportation capacity of one mode of transport in a route with multiple legs with one source and multiple target locations with different lead times.

Capacity consumption is calculated for all stock transfer requisitions, stock transfer orders, purchase requisitions, and purchase orders according to the consumption policy. Capacity consumption at start is only supported for internal stock transfers.

Gating factors for transportation resources are also created according to the consumption policy.

Sales and Operations Planning: Aggregated Constraint in Time Dimension Supported by Time-Series Optimizer

The optimizer now supports aggregated constraints in time dimensions other than time granularity of the planning run. If the algorithm is run, for example, on a monthly level, the time root of the aggregated constraint can be at a monthly, quarterly, or yearly level. You can switch aggregate constraints between soft and hard constraints. The result is an improved supply plan aligned with business needs considering constraints at aggregate level in both time and non-time dimension. Here some examples of business scenarios that are now supported:

• Generate rough-cut distribution plans respecting minimum shipping volume contracts established with carriers (for example, product group/ship-from location/ship-to location and quarterly period)
• Specify minimum and maximum production capacity usage over a month/quarter for a product family
• Yearly product allocation on product family level while time-series optimizer is run at weekly time granularity

Innovations in Integration and Foundation

Integration & Foundation: Display of Planning Notes from Dashboards

You can now display the planning notes captured for all charts during the planning process directly on your dashboard. This feature makes it a lot easier to quickly compare planning notes between charts while retaining the context of the charts on the dashboard. You see at a glance which chart elements have associated planning notes and you can display key figure information at detailed or aggregated level.

Integration & Foundation: Enablement of SAP IBP in SAP Launchpad Service

SAP Launchpad service enables you to establish a central point of access to SAP IBP apps and SAP S/4 HANA cloud and on-premise apps. SAP Launchpad service is an SAP Business Technology Platform service.

User productivity and efficiency is increased by providing a central and intuitive point of access to applications and services needed to get the job done.

Your administrators can integrate all relevant content and central services in one launchpad and create sites by assigning roles from different providers to offer role-based content and navigation.

Integration & Foundation: Integration with
SAP Work Zone

With SAP IBP 2108 we released the integration of SAP Work Zone for social collaboration. SAP Work Zone allows users to collaborate with other members of their teams, share business data with them, and track processes and process-related tasks in the apps. It’s available in all apps that require social collaboration. Users can collaborate with each other without having to interrupt their work and leave the applications. They can share business data and other information (job templates, custom alerts, etc.) with members of their collaboration group and even share planning-related information from the SAP IBP, add-in for Microsoft Excel. The integration also provides users with access to their SAP Work Zone home page where they can view the feed, enter status update, start discussion with colleagues, and so on.

Integration & Foundation: New SAP Fiori App for Managing Planning Objects

The long-awaited central app for managing planning objects in SAP IBP is finally here. In this first release, you can display and delete existing planning objects in the app. Creation of planning objects and other use cases around managing planning objects are planned for the upcoming releases. The app offers a complete overview of existing planning objects and allows you to search for specific objects, for example obsolete objects that can be deleted, in a straightforward and user-friendly way.

More Information

• SAP IBP What’s New 2108, Part 1: Foundation, Planning UIs and Technical Topics PDF | Recording
• SAP IBP What’s New 2108, Part 2: Business Process Planning Applications (Demand, Inventory, etc.) PDF | Recording
• SAP IBP Overview
• What’s New in 2108 Documentation
• SAP IBP Community
• Roadmaps
• SAP Customer Influence Portal for SAP IBP
• Questions? Ask here