Deploying SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain

How do you get started leveraging the SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) for Supply Chain solution for your company? Every company’s journey is different, and deployment is based on the business priorities and challenges that it faces.

The following are considerations when leveraging SAP IBP:

• Deploy based on your business priorities.

• If you lack visibility and the information to manage the end-to-end supply chain, consider starting with SAP Integrated Business Planning for sales and operations and/or with SAP Supply Chain Control Tower. SAP Integrated Business Planning for sales and operations is most often chosen as the first module to be implemented. When it is place, implementation of subsequent modules can be significantly accelerated.

• If you have challenges making sure that the right inventory is in the right place at the right time, you can start with SAP Integrated Business Planning for inventory.

• Start with any solution quickly and easily, because SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain solutions are offered in the cloud. No time is lost planning and investing in costly infrastructure and IT resources for system operations.

• Configure solutions that are delivered with out-of-the box functionality to meet your business requirements and reconfigure them as your business grows and changes.

• Adopt solutions as required without costly integration methods, because solutions are delivered on the same platform. All solutions use the same data and have a unified code base.

The standard delivered planing areas of SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) for Supply Chain and other elements of the Rapid Deployment (templates, sample analytics, sample datasets, and so on) are configured to support the design and implementation process as follows:

• Current process and tools are embedded
• Ease of setting up a proof of concept model and conducting mockups with business users
• Flexible configuration capabilities for demos in 3 to 5 sprints before go-live

A planning model is a master plan that defines how information is stored and aggregated in a system. The SAP IBP solution includes the following sample planning models:

• SAP3 - Inventory

• SAP4 - Supply (and some S&OP)

• SAP 4C – Business Network Collaboration

• SAP 4S – Time Series Shelf Life Planning Heuristics

• SAP6 - Demand

• SAP9 - MRO

• SAP7F – Response

• SAP8 – DDMRP Buffer Planning

• SAPIBP1 – Unified Planning Area

You can start creating your own model by copying one of the sample models and then extending it as necessary to meet your particular business needs. You can add your own master data types, key figures, calculations, and attributes or adapt existing ones as required. With release 2305 the sample planning area SAP7 has been removed and only planning area SAP7F will be available for order-based planning.