SCM SOLUTIONS

LEVERAGE THE STRENGTH OF ADVANCED SUPPLY CHAIN PLANNING SOLUTIONS

You encounter changes every day in your dealings with your partners: your clients approach you with new requests, your suppliers put forth new constraints on you. Often, it can take quite some time for your entire supply chain to adapt to the new situation.

Our SAP SCM solutions provide you with a quick and comprehensive overview of the demand for your products, your warehouse stocks and production capacities as well as your suppliers' offers.

 

These provide you real-time data analytics and comprehensive end-to-end visibility of your supply chain network, enabling you to make smarter, faster decisions and respond more effectively to change.

 

SAP currently offers two solutions for planning and managing your supply chain:

 

SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP)

IBP is SAP's new state-of-the-art planning platform for integrated real-time supply chain planning - based on SAP HANA, for cloud deployment.

SAP IBP offers integrated, company-wide planning with components for sales & operations planning, sales planning, inventory optimisation and response & supply planning. In addition, a Supply Chain Control Tower (SCCT) with configurable dashboards for comprehensive analysis and monitoring of the entire supply chain can be implemented across modules.

 

THE KEY FEATURES OF SAP IBP ARE

  • Supply chain planning in real time
  • Scenario planning with simulation functions and comparison options
  • Performance monitoring
  • Intuitive user interface with MS Excel or Web UI as front-end
  • SAP JAM collaboration platform
  • Classic forecasting methods combined with advanced machine learning algorithms / demand sensing
  • Time series analysis
  • Multi-level inventory optimisation
  • Rough capacity planning taking into account capacity and material restrictions
  • Heuristics- or optimizer-based supply planning
  • Order-based planning with allocation and availability check
  • Demand-Driven Replenishment
  • Supply chain monitoring
  • Event-driven exception management

SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO)

The "Advanced Planner and Optimizer" is SAP's classic supply chain planning tool that enables the optimization of demand planning, supply network planning, production planning as well as transport and distribution planning and also has a component for cross-location availability checks (global ATP).

 

It is the predecessor of SAP IBP, and has been on the market since the late 1990s. It is therefore very mature and reliable, and is currently the SCM planning solution most used by SAP customers, although its support and further development will expire in 2027.

You can find more about the components, their future availability and a comparison between IBP and APO on our website under "SAP APO".


SAP SCM WITH S/4 HANA OR ECC

Both SAP Integrated Business Planning and SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer can be integrated with S/4 HANA, SAP's current ERP platform, as well as with the classic SAP ECC.

 

By combining various ERP components with different modules from the supply chain planning solutions, an end-to-end supply chain management process can be established, whereby the ERP system typically takes over the more operational steps of this process. 

 

The different variants of component selection and process design as well as possibilities for implementation are presented in detail under "SCM with SAP ERP and IBP".

 

For an in-depth discussion of these topics, follow our IBP ERP blog.