Sales and Operations Planning

ThomasKlemm · ‎02-02-2022

Today, February 2nd, 2022, SAP® Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain 2202 has been generally released as planned.

The new year starts with some excellent news: With the delivery of integration content for Maintenance, Repair and Operations (MRO), SAP IBP is broadening and further standardizing its capabilities in the world of parts and workforce planning. A co-innovation initiative involving over 100 customers showed that in asset-intensive industries supply chain disruptions are often the result of a gap between supply planning and maintenance planning. Over the coming releases, we’re planning to bridge this gap by delivering an end-to-end integrative pathway from SAP Enterprise Asset Management into SAP IBP allowing customers to capture and forecast their maintenance parts and workforce demand.

Check out this and other highlights:

Maintenance, Repair and Operations (MRO) - Parts and Workforce Planning Based on Integration with SA...

With the integration of selected asset management master data for Maintenance, Repair and Operations (MRO) and a dedicated planning area, we’re now offering preconfigured content to address the planning requirements of asset-intensive industries. The preconfigured content allows to plan and optimize preventive and corrective maintenance of spare parts and labor resources. It enables planners to effectively forecast demand for the spare parts and labor resource usage, leading to financial projections. It also helps to see and resolve issues in the supply of spare parts.

The integration is based on extractors to import master data from SAP EAM to SAP IBP. Preconfigured templates in SAP Cloud Integration for data services help to quickly define data flows.

To simplify configuration, we’re delivering an MRO-specific planning area with a configured demand forecasting method (Croston method) and supply heuristics. For future corrective maintenance, historical consumption of components and resources are considered. For future preventive maintenance, all maintenance plan orders are considered.

This integration enables customers to quickly get data from plant maintenance to SAP IBP and to model MRO processes adhering to the industry processes in the provided planning area.

Sales and Operations Planning

New Manage Tasks App

The new Manage Tasks app gives you more flexibility in managing the tasks for your processes, independent of additional social collaboration tools like SAP JAM or SAP Work Zone. The tasks created by process management can be completely managed within SAP IBP. If you do decide to use social collaboration tools, task changes are synched both ways.

The new app improves user experience for both, process owners and planners: Process owners can add new tasks to existing processes. Planners can easily find tasks and change their status or create standalone tasks that are not connected to existing processes. Task owners can edit the tasks, for example, by changing the description, the task assignee or priority, and even delete tasks, if necessary.

Planning UIs

VBA Extensibility in the SAP IBP, add-in for Microsoft Excel

It's challenging to fulfill the business needs of all customers with one standard solution. Therefore, extensibility is key to adjust to evolving and unique customer demands and their specific use cases and workflows.

In this release, we’re delivering further capabilities that allow you to extend the features provided by the SAP IBP, add-in for Microsoft Excel (Excel add-in) using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to access SAP IBP specific function calls.

New APIs can be used to enhance the Excel add-in and its planning view templates to reflect specific business processes. This allows you to drive process efficiency and planner productivity by automating recurring manual steps. Enhanced data analytics capabilities can be created by building custom drill-down and navigation patterns. You can, for example, configure a planning view template where planners can go through the combinations they are in charge of one by one, enter their changes, and then click Save & Next.

As part of simple and easy-to-use APIs, we are also providing VBA samples that can be adjusted to your specific business needs. More APIs to reflect further business use cases are planned for the coming releases.

Planning View Appearance in Planner Workspaces

Planning views often show a wide range of different key figures that are needed to make important decisions and assess supply chain disruptions. It can be challenging to keep an overview and avoid jumping into the wrong cell accidentally. To visualize and analyze the situation in complex planning views more easily, we added the capability to define appearance settings.

These settings allow you to customize your planning views even further, make them more readable, and to provide options to put focus on important key figures.

You can apply different formatting and colors based on basic rules, key figure rules, and period rules. Basic rules help you, for example, to hide repeating attribute values in your planning view. Key figure rules help, for instance, to define decimal places for selected key figures.

Response & Supply

New Supply Planning Run

The new Supply Planning Run application job template offers one common flexible way to set up and schedule supply planning jobs. It supports supply planning with order confirmation and with allocation creation. You can select independent demand types (sales order, forecast) or plan safety buffer or adjusted key figure(s) only.

Supply Planning Run also offers maximum flexibility when it comes to execution: You can execute the planning run either with finite heuristic or optimizer using version, scenario, or simulation and schedule it from the Application Jobs, Planner Workspaces and Projected Stock apps or from the Excel add-in. In the planning run profile, you can switch sales order confirmations and forecast fulfillment on or off.

System Data Comparison and Reconciliation for Real-Time Integration (RTI)

The new app Data Comparison and Reconciliation for RTI allows you to identify and correct data inconsistencies between SAP IBP and a connected external system (SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA). The app helps to ensure real-time data integrity and flawless synchronization so that planners can be confident that the data is fully in sync.

You can assess the planning data contained in SAP IBP for correctness by comparing it with the data in the connected external systems at any point in time. It allows you to trigger actions to reconcile the detected inconsistencies and, if necessary, to re-check the results of the corrections.