SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain ...

ThomasKlemm · ‎08-05-2022

Today, August 5, 2022, SAP®Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain 2208 has been generally released as planned.

A major highlight of this release is the planning booster that comes with SAP HANA Cloud. SAP IBP can now run on SAP HANA Cloud, boosting overall infrastructure scalability. This move enables a completely elastic and self-adjusting cloud infrastructure that can increase the peak processing capacity of SAP IBP.

Check out this and some of the other highlights included in SAP IBP 2208:

Response and Supply

Optimize Stock Transfers and Procurement with Transportation Load Building

Transportation Load Building (TLB) pools planned distribution receipts of the same transportation lane and delivery date into transportation loads by choosing from multiple equipment types like type of truck or type of container.

TLB optimizes the usage of your transportation equipment and reduces transportation costs by building optimal loads that best utilize the given equipment type.
You can automatically generate and display loads in the Planner Workspaces app. A real-time integration of multi-item load requisitions to SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA is available.

TLB in SAP IBP uses a new cost-based load optimization algorithm that considers any number of different equipment types with flexible configurable equipment limits such as weight, volume, or pallets. The equipment limits are based on alternate units per product.

Improve Planner Productivity Through Flexible Planning Scope Definition for Supply Planning

Solving supply chain problems is a complex endeavor. The high amount of data points needed is one of the main drivers for this complexity. Previously, planners were only able to define the planning scope based on predefined subnetworks. The new version of the SAP IBP, add-in for Microsoft Excel allows a flexible definition of the planning scope in the S&OP Operator function of the add-in.

Changes to a plan are often localized and you only need to re-plan the affected part of a large supply network. For example, planners can restrict a planning run to those location products for which they're responsible, or to those affected by a change in input, such as a sudden increase in demand. Using filters based on attributes assigned to the master data types location, product, or location product helps to narrow down the planning scope and reduces run times. In the example, the planners could filter the subnetworks by the specific product group that they’re responsible for. The planning run is executed for the part and neighborhood of the network that meets the filter criteria and that's in accordance with the environment extension policy.

The support of planning filters also enables an efficient reuse of planning scope definitions.

Extend Your Supply Chain Planning Model to Supplier Locations

Today’s supply chains extend beyond in-company supply and demand matching. Challenges, constraints, and disruptions often arise outside the company network in upstream supplying tiers.

With SAP IBP 2208, we offer a more streamlined model of multi-tier vendor relationships. You can now model upstream constraints and material flow at supplier locations and consider them in operational supply planning.

To complete the picture, product and transport constraints and the availability of critical components in the supplier network can also be considered.

Improved Transparency With New Key Figures for Requested Quantities

Planners want to ensure that finished goods demand is fulfilled in time. Often unavailability of components results in late fulfillment or issues with high priority demands. We therefore offer new key figures to provide visibility of actual requested dates. These dates for constrained components enable planners to collaborate with the relevant component vendors to solve issues in procurement and to get all components shipped in time. They can compare requested and constrained quantities and dates to better understand and solve supply chain issues and use the new key figures to explain existing gating factors by comparison of requested and constrained dates.

The new key figures provide dates and quantities of infinite supply planning result in addition to the already available constrained quantities and dates of the finite supply plan and help to improve component availability by collaboration with your vendors.

You can view and analyze how the dependent demand and supply quantities based on the requested dates are pegged to independent demands.

Comparing requested and planned/constrained quantities and dates helps to better understand and solve supply chain issues at different levels of the supply chain.

Planning UIs

Flexible Filtering with Value-Based Filters in Planner Workspaces

SAP IBP hosts a wealth of data. Targeted filtering is key for leveraging this data. While filters based on attribute values serve a lot of purposes, there are use cases in which a different approach is required. Let’s say you want to see products that have a high demand or cause shortages. By using value-based filters in Planner Workspaces, you can easily achieve this. Planners can now combine attribute-based and value-based filters to find the relevant planning data.

Value-based filters comprise conditions that match key figure values within the specified time periods. You can also filter for empty, non-empty, zero, or non-zero data points and define how the specified thresholds should be applied.

SAP IBP General

Boost Your Planning with SAP HANA Cloud

Supply chain planning often must consider billions of nodes across an extended supply chain, requiring extensive computing power. The use of SAP HANA Cloud removes hardware bottlenecks so customers can benefit from faster decision-making capacity across comprehensive scenarios, globally optimized planning options, and more extensive supply chain networks. It supports agile planning, resilient growth, and business continuity in the face of widespread supply chain disruptions.

Higher peak processing capacity lifts performance bottlenecks, allows for large scale rollouts, fine-granular planning, and fast response to what-if scenarios. If your data volume increases, SAP IBP learns and automatically adjusts the necessary capacity. Large planning jobs are executed on dedicated hardware nodes avoiding resource conflicts with ongoing interactive usage of the system.

SAP IBP customers will benefit from the increased resilience, performance, and scalability in a phased approach, as we ramp up capacity and migrate customers over the next several quarters.

Simplified Planning with Disaggregation Based on Calculated Key Figures

Planners and planning processes change key figure values on different planning levels in SAP IBP. For example, values maintained for a product group can be disaggregated by different rules to the corresponding products on lower level.

With SAP IBP 2208 a new disaggregation rule is available that allows you to disaggregate values based on the calculated value of another key figure. This new option provides more flexibility than the current disaggregation based on stored key figures and further enhances the real-time planning capabilities of SAP IBP.

The system disaggregates key figure values proportionally to the calculated values of another key figure. Key figure changes can be directly considered in real time.

The new disaggregation option also helps to simplify planning area set up and copy processes: key figures used to store proportional factors and jobs to copy data from calculated to stored key figures are no longer needed.