What is SAP IBP Sales and Operations Planning?
Sales and Operations Planning is now part of the SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) suite from SAP, powered by HANA. It is a critical process which helps engage key stakeholders in an efficient and integrated planning process, delivering aligned and profitable demand and supply plans. This next generation planning solution provides a unified model to;
- Facilitate demand and supply balance
- Integrate financial and operational planning to maximize
bottom-line impact - Link high level strategic plans with day-to-day operations
IBP S&OP goes beyond traditional supply chain planning to produce an
integrated plan and provides the following business benefits;
- Reduce inventory costs
- Improvement in reaction time, agility and accuracy
- Identifies tactics to drive revenue growth and increase market share
- Higher customer service
- Less volatility in production plans
- Higher margins when product supply is constrained
- Optimizes product profitability, customer profitability and product mix
Current S&OP Painpoints and Business Challenges
- Complex supply chains and increasingly volatile demand
- Inability to analyse amounts of data for planning
- Manual process for compiling data that consume time and introduce errors
- Difficulty driving consensus demand a single “plan of truth”
- Too hard to simulate and compare planning scenarios
- Planning decisions made without considering supply chain constraints and profitability
- Hard to share and disconnected S&OP information against planning tools
IBP S&OP powered by HANA
SAP’s IBP S&OP tool is based on HANA technology, and purpose built to support advanced S&OP processes. It is available both as a “cloud” solution hosted by SAP, and as an “on premise” solution hosted by the customer. S&OP is a “big data” problem, where millions of records needs to be processed quickly. S&OP powered by HANA provides high computation power speed and high scalability with in-memory computing ability.
Summary
IBP S&OP powered by HANA can help businesses improve their S&OP process and help gain business benefits to;
- Precisely balance demand and supply
- Avoid capacity and material shortages
- Improving customer service
- Minimize inventory levels (and associated costs)
- Decide on optimal product mix considering the supply and financial constraints
- Drive revenue growth and increase market share
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