Business success should not require heroic efforts from a Planner!
Supply Chain Management is complex and a planner needs to make decisions that consider the context of the decision horizontally from different parts of the organization like finance, manufacturing, logistics. For example taking into account profitability, working capital investments, comparing scenarios relative to business goals like customer service, cost.
Working as a planner is definitely a tough job, thinking about the planning for the coming days, weeks and months, but also have to act immediately on problems, with all the spreadsheets, tools, post-its, mails and phone calls, awful lot of balls to juggle.
Apparently, “Train as you fight" becomes the new normal and making a plan in the middle of a pandemics has certainly proofed it is no laughing matter.
Companies most urgently are looking into ways how they can enable event driven planning based on disruptions like supply disruptions, labor shortages, demand spikes, capacity downtimes, lead time issues. Seeking for being able to vertically execute decisions and monitor adoption, for example into production scheduling, transportation, supplier management.
The business challenge is that necessary information is spread across different places. What is needed to bring this all together in one place. SAP embarked on an innovation journey, called planner workplace that aims to address this topic.
Solution: Planner Workspace
SAP provides for this journey a planner workspace as part of the SAP Integrated Business Planning platform. You can see Planner Workspace as a kind of platform (framework) for multiple components which can be consumed and configured the way that you get your job done, as needed.
Planner workspace is an important technical enabler of our synchronized planning vision. We envision planning as a continuum across the supply and demand network – from design to production, and logistics planning.
Our strategy is, that with synchronized planning, you can support multiple scenarios and the closed-loop process of anticipating, planning, and executing across all supply chain stages and time horizons – that’s what it takes to be agile.
Goal of the Planner Workspace is to provide a unified workspace for planners to plan, simulate and respond to their business scenario from a consolidated user interface. So, users can centrally plan, analyze, and resolve supply chain issues across planning and execution domains in future managing so variability - for example demand spikes - and disruption - for example sudden supply shortage - better.
The highly configurable Planner Workspace delivers a personalized digital experience that shows what’s needed to get the job done and hides complexities that are not needed. This is a great time-saver for planners to align on decisions and to be able to execute decision-based on the same user experience.
- Empower the planner
- Increase productivity
- Work faster and collaborate more effectively
- Simulate and see immediate impact
- Be agile
- Make better decisions
- Reduce inefficiencies and costs
The Planner Workspace guides users from alerts over the details to the actions. This reduces errors and flattens the learning curve of new planners.
The Planner Workspace provides relevant information and actions needed by Planners from a single page. You can create several workspaces depending on your role or need and can also share them with others.
Flexible configuration of Planning Views is possible to analyze your planning data. Alert highlighting within Planning Views allows easy identification of issues and bottlenecks. Basically, you can so manage exceptions like a sudden demand spike, a supply shortage or a capacity constraint capacity quickly and efficiently.
Planner Workspace supports What-If Simulations to simulate effects on key figure changes. You can also create and manage scenarios right from the Planner Workspace. The imbalance of (strong) demand and (disrupted) supply which many companies currently face, is a perfect example for how important it is to run simulations and scenarios to predict impact on supply chain and revenue stream. Planner workspace is the technical enabler to achieve that with a personalized digital experience.
Embedding new or existing analytics charts into the Planner Workspace provides insights to actions. It allows users to grasp the situation and impact of simulations at a glance while simultaneously working on their plan and addressing supply chain issues. This feature is fully integrated into simulation, scenario and basic changes related to the chart definition can be made directly from the Planner Workspace.
At the end it is clear, our goal is to enable a holistic planner workspace and personalize the workspace and simultaneously view is all what a Supply chain Planner really needs to do the job best, without requiring heroic efforts!
