Connect the dots: Re-think supply chain planning and go beyond enterprise boundaries with SAP IBP!

Supply chain leaders across the globe are under tremendous pressure to keep customer promise while constantly reducing costs. Rising customer expectations and increasingly complex supply chain networks force many companies to either increase massively stocks or costly source, manufacture and deliver to meet customer demand.

...so what? It's a well-known problem...

Indeed, it's nothing new - but with SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP) we have a smart answer by leveraging web-based planning capabilities, opening up supply chains upstream towards suppliers and downstream towards your customers - all out of your planning systems where you're business assumptions are defined!

...tell me more about it....

SAP IBP is SAP's market leading supply chain planning solution enabling various core planning processes like demand planning, statistical forecasting, inventory optimization, supply planning, yes up to S&OP processes and DDMRP. However, no matter how well we progress on improving our business assumptions, there is no better way than asking your business partners and opening up value chains.

With the latest releases of SAP IBP, we have added various key capabilities for business partner collaborations. Now, our customers can directly collaborate with their business partners directly in IBP using the Web-Based Planning app by giving access to the IBP landscape.

You can for example create and share specific planning views which are of relevance when collaborating with the specific business partners containing only the relevant key figures for the collaboration. Your business partners can then view the required data and give feedback given their permission rights.

...tell me more about potential scenarios...

Well, it depends on your specific business needs. but when for example collaborating with your suppliers, you could get a forecast commit on the supply plan. This gives you the required confidence in meeting customer demand without driving costly overstocking strategies and taking expensive inventory carrying costs (in average 25% of the inventories!). Cash is cheap these days, yes, but holding inventories from an operational perspective not! Leveraging your supply chain planning system for business collaboration has one significant advantage, not only you but as well your business partners speak the same language and can work on pre-defined scenarios (best, worst, ideal). This gives you from a risk-mitigation point of view additional insights in order to ensure seamless operations.

But you could as well imagine to drive customer collaboration strategies by aligning your supply chains closer to your customer expectations. This enables higher SLAs, improvement in forecast accuracy and velocity of your supply chain. At same time, you can avoid lost sales through prevention of stock-outs by much earlier capturing the demand signals and potential demand variabilities. Connecting your customers to the platform is possible the same way as for suppliers by leveraging the web-based planning UI.

...but there is more. For occassional users like Sales Reps, you could hand-out the web-planning UI working on notebooks, tablets etc. while they're visiting their customers and re-confirming the demands of the upcoming weeks, months and quarters. This ensures the customer receives the right products at right time while preparing our own supply chain earliest and best possible for the upcoming transactions - so win/win.

Below a short overview of the different roles:

The web-based planning UI would look as shown in the below illustration, giving the required visibility to enable a consumable feedback effort:

...sounds amazing, what were the latest innovations and what are the future directions?

Well we had various key innovations in the recent releases like:

• Versions: Compare (Delivered with 1905) and Promote
• User-defined Scenarios: Create, Compare, & Manage (Delivered with 1908)
• Simulations and Drilldown: e.g. Simulate (basic) (Delivered with 1908)
• Fixing: Open planning view with fixing indicator, Fix and Unfix Key figure values (Delivered with 1908 and 1911)
• Support Attribute permissions (Delivered with 1911)
• Other usability enhancements: Freeze columns, column filtering, full-screen mode, last refresh

Some of the planned innovations (only direction, can change without prior notification, keep disclaimer in mind) like planning notes, new side panels etc. are in our innovation pipeline. Some lab preview below:

If you want to get more detailed information and you missed out the webinar, please check out the following link where our experts shared their view on collaboration within supply chain planning: LINK

...wait one final question, how does it fit with Ariba Supply Chain Collaboration

In the link above you'll see the positioning of supply chain collaboration as per SAP's current understanding, but for your overview check out the illustration below

Supply chain collaboration has a tremendous business value towards various aspects like SLAs, cost, productivity and working capital. It's time to re-think your supply chain operations! If you want to learn more, feel free to contact your SAP contact person or simply drop me a note!

Best wishes

Arsim