SAP IBP

What's New in the 2008 Release of SAP Integrated Business Planning


After returning from vacation, we were able to start testing the new features that the 2008 version of SAP Integrated Business Planning (August 2020 in the SAP nomenclature) brings. As always, every 3 months the solution is renewed and new features or improvements appear on the existing ones, sometimes it is worth the wait! Being a SAP cloud tool, new functions or improvements are managed by SAP itself and does not involve additional effort on the part of SAP or IT, which is a very big difference compared to the process of updating previous tools.

We propose from now on to tell in this forum how the tool evolves and we are going to start with this one, the last one.

Drill-down on the Dashboard

Until now, the advantages of navigation or drill-down in the Dashboards were a bit hidden since you had to first navigate to the definition of the Graph by opening a new screen and from there to the option to navigate. This had two clear drawbacks: loss of time and especially of context when losing sight of the other Charts that made up the context of the dashboard. Finally SAP allows navigation directly from the dashboard!

The change is absorbed by the application itself and it is not necessary to change anything in the existing Dashboards.

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This function allows you to build Analysis Dashboards (root-cause analysis), navigating from an aggregated view of the problem where it is visible for the first time, to a sufficient level of detail where we find the answer. The navigation path is completely user configurable and can reach multiple levels. In the case of the image, we have gone from a view grouped by product criticality of the value invested in safety stock to a detail by product family of the investment in criticality E products.

In the new version it is also possible to transport Dashboards and Charts separately, which will also save us something by simplifying its construction process.

Dashboards are an integral part of SAP IBP and are available in all its modules.

Sustitución de producto

Both the MRP of IBP for S&OP and the time series optimizer in IBP for Response and Supply allow product substitution scenarios for the usual scenarios of remaining stock in substitution of product at the end of life (ProdA2019 à ProdA2020) as well as for scenarios where A promotional product has its own material code but, once the promotion is finished, we want to use the remaining stock to cover demand for the standard product (ProdAPromo à ProdA). The optimizer is even able to decide through costs whether or not it is worth using one or the other product in each case.

Simplified calculations

For some versions, SAP has been gradually simplifying the way in which important calculations in SCM are modeled in IBP from the simple displacement of a value to the following year (how much did I sell last month compared to what I sold the previous year? ) to the aggregation by last period (the projected stock of an MRP in weeks seen at a monthly level is the projected stock of the last week, not the sum of the stocks of each week!). In IBP these calculations are carried out in real time each time the user or the application requests the data, without the need for background processes to be programmed!

Initially all this was solved at a very technical level, but SAP now includes functions that encapsulate all this complexity. The two new functions are the weighted average and the hedge calculation.

The weighted average often appears in calculations (forecast, average price calculation …) and being able to obtain it dynamically makes planning more agile. SAP IBP now includes the IBP_WEIGHTEDAVG function:

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The coverage was highly anticipated by us as it was a regular request from our clients and decouples the calculation from the MRP execution, while reducing implementation time to almost nothing. With it, it will be easier to obtain aggregate coverage to analyze the behavior of the different product families. SAP IBP includes the IBP_COVERAGE function:

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Simplified calculations are an integral part of SAP IBP and are available in all its modules.

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