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ThomasKlemm
Advisor
Advisor


Get ready for a new year with exciting features which are all geared towards tackling the challenges of building a risk-resilient and sustainable supply chain.

Today, February 03, 2023, SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain 2302 has been generally released as planned.

We are off to a great start in 2023 with a lot of innovative new topics that we are planning to deliver throughout the year: Next-generation Planner Workspaces, subcontracting with operational supply planning, and service level prediction in inventory optimization, just to name a few.
But let‘s now focus on some of the highlights included in SAP IBP 2302:

Eliminate Risks and Visualize Planning Results with Supply Chain Risk Management ​


Risk visibility and risk resiliency is a key focus topic for us and our customers in 2023. As a first step, we defined a new risk dashboard based on risks that can be found within the supply chain planning data itself. The scores help to uncover risks and steer supply chain planning based on risk factors, for example, during executive review meetings or as a recurring planner task. We’re delivering the dashboard as an SAP Best Practices scope item.

Scores are used to illustrate risks that result from low forecast accuracy, inaccurate safety stock levels, resource bottlenecks, and excess CO2 emissions. Drilldown capabilities to detail pages in each area help to analyze the effects and root causes.

This scope item is an excellent example of how the new analytics stories embedded in SAP IBP leverage best-in-class analysis and visualization capabilities. It supports reporting from within the business application and helps planners to discover and subsequently eliminate planning risks throughout the supply chain network to improve resilience.


Sales and Operations Planning


Unlock Potential for Collaborative Work on Tasks with Integration of Microsoft Teams​


With the new integration of Microsoft Teams (MS Teams) and SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain, we bring people, processes, and data effectively together in order to reduce the costs of collaboration and accelerate decision-making. We’re empowering employees to maximize efficiency for collaborative work on tasks. The integration offers additional ways to manage and monitor tasks in SAP IBP and helps to shorten the response time.


Utilizing the capabilities of MS Teams delights users with rich collaborative experiences and its native app "Tasks by Planner and To Do" offers increased variety for presenting tasks, for example calendar-based format, list format, or built-in analytical charts.


https://youtu.be/aPcNK8YQW14

 

Response and Supply


Reduce Transportation Costs with Interactive Planning of Transportation Loads in Planner Workspaces ...


Planners can now view loadable distribution receipts in the component Transportation Load Building of the Planner Workspaces app and create a transportation load for selected distribution receipts and equipment types. They can also add further distribution receipts to a load and delete items from a load.


This new feature helps to reduce transportation costs by interactively optimizing the utilization of planned transportation loads. It also improves the quality of the distribution plan by making interactive changes to planned transportation loads to react to short-term events.



 

Demand


Increased Forecast Accuracy by Considering Business Insights within Outlier Handling


Identifying and correcting outliers in the sales history is a central forecasting feature. In most cases, the existing logic of SAP IBP reliably detects and handles outliers. However, there can be special situations that the system can’t explain or misinterprets, for example, extreme weather events like flooding or storms that cause a drop in sales within a certain region.​

With SAP IBP 2302, the planner can easily include external business insights in outlier handling by maintaining a new key figure for “outlier markers” and manually marking certain sales periods as outliers or non-outliers. Outlier marking can also be done on aggregated level. For example, after a hurricane you could mark the sales of a certain week in the region “US East Cost” to be an outlier.

Including external business-relevant information in your planning helps to significantly increase forecast accuracy.



Accurate Predictions with New Forecast Error Measure for Sporadic Items


In the past, the available error measures for selecting the best algorithm in a best-fit scenario weren’t always suitable for items with sporadic sales pattern. With the new forecast error measure “Stock-keeping-oriented Prediction Error Costs” (SPEC) we’re now closing this gap.​

When using SPEC, the planner can define in the forecast model whether the priority should be on avoiding stockouts or high inventory costs.​ The new forecast measure helps to increase forecast accuracy, especially when dealing with sporadic sales patterns.

SPEC can be used within best-fit selection as well as a new error measure of the post-processing process (model-fit error).



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