Explaining the Integration With SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP)

SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain (SAP IBP for Supply Chain) is a cloud-based solution that combines sales and operations planning (S&OP), forecasting and demand, response and supply, demand-driven replenishment, and inventory planning. It allows customers to automate and tightly coordinate supply chain planning processes. It is the future of supply chain management, and integration with SAP Build Work Zone helps bring together everything in a single workspace, making the life of an end user easier.

First, the overall integration scenarios, covering both out-of-the-box and custom, of SAP Build Work Zone and SAP IBP, need to be reviewed.

• Creation of UI Integration cards which show essential information about IBP (for example, Sales and Planning) in the Work Zone and open IBP in the same window, rather than opening another browser.
• SAP Build Work Zone can provide a unified workspace for planners to complete their business scenarios from a single configurable UI. Users can centrally plan, analyze, and resolve supply chain issues across planning and execution domains. This workspace is easily changeable and configurable by business users across multiple roles, and templates can be leverage for expediting the initial setup experience.
• Planning efficiency is increased by streamlined navigation from alerts to details, and then directly to the required actions.
• SAP IBP applications can be made available as an iframe under the shell header bar of Work Zone for efficient access to relevant transactions.

Now that the overall scenarios and benefits of integrating SAP IBP into SAP Build Work Zone are clear, the remainder of this lesson will cover the required setup and configuration considerations.

A company administrator can integrate SAP IBP to SAP Build Work Zone via a content provider for cloud. A content provider exposes business content from a source to make it accessible across the different experiences in SAP Build Work Zone. The content exposure flow involves setting up the communication arrangement between the content provider system and SAP Build Work Zone, exposing the roles that to be integrated. For this setup to work, a design time destination that will fetch the exposed content is required.

The other integration setup with SAP IBP and SAP Build Work Zone primarily focuses on task management by allowing users to create, and/or monitor tasks in SAP Build Work Zone from the SAP IBP experience. As part of the integration with SAP Build Work Zone, tasks can be executed in Work Zone workspaces assigned to the user. Therefore, technically, the tasks created in IBP are Work Zone tasks. An example use case is to follow-up on tasks related to sales and operations planning done within SAP IBP. The so-called collaboration tile allows users to view SAP Build Work Zone in an embedded way using the IBP navigation shell. The process management application allows creation of workspace for each process template step. SAP IBP Planners can use these capabilities to share information (for example, changes to planning data or share objects such as, application job templates or web planning views), view, edit, and complete process-related tasks that they have been assigned.

Note

You can integrate only one SAP Build Work Zone system into your SAP IBP system. For more information about using SAP Build Work Zone in SAP IBP, see Social Collaboration.

Specifically, the task management integration scenario was previously available for SAP Jam Collaboration (Enterprise Edition).

Note

You can only use either SAP Jam or SAP Build Work Zone for social collaboration in SAP IBP. You cannot use both tools at the same time. Other collaboration tools are not supported.