In today’s fast moving world, there is an ever increasing demand for customisation and personalisation, whether it be initials stitched on to your running shoes or a bespoke paint colour for your car. Everyone likes to have a personal touch in their day to day activities, so why should SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) be any different?

If you haven’t seen the SAP IBP Excel Add-In, or want to know more about the various functionalities offered, please take a read of this blog from Steve Rampton “SAP IBP Excel Views – A Planners dream?”. I will split this blog as to how Planners can create their own personalised views within SAP IBP in two;

• Basic formatting of the Excel Add-In
• The advanced Olivehorse way!

It has been a while since I first published this Blog. In the 2+ years that have gone by, a lot of functionality has been delivered with each upgraded version of SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP), especially with the Demand application. 

In the world of ‘Internet of Things’ and Digital Transformation, where companies want to respond faster to customer needs, we have all read about SAP’s vision to enable businesses to transform from what were previously Supply Chains into Demand Networks.

But where does SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) for Demand fit in to this?  And as a Planner, should you be Demanding IBP?

In order to remove some of the uncertainty and puzzlement as to what exactly IBP for Demand can offer, in this post I intend to explain some key differences between SAP Advanced Planning & Optimisation (APO) and SAP IBP for Demand.

There are many blogs on the topic of Agile, and there are many blog posts on the topic of SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP). But not many blogs on the combined topic of Agile IBP Implementation! In this blog I intend to share my thoughts as to how a SAP IBP implementation is suited to an Agile approach. Really suited!

As SAP continue to enrich the functionality of Integrated Business Planning (IBP), in this blog I am going to describe the outlier detection and correction methods offered within IBP for demand (as at release 1608). I will not however be discussing which of these methods are the best, as from my experience I have found that the rules and methods vary depending on the organization’s perspectives and processes followed.

In this blog I will walk through the principles of ‘Attribute Transformations’ within SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) and discuss the basics of implementing such transformations.

We will also look at how some demand planning scenarios like displaying Year -1 data, Realignment (which is not currently offered as standard within SAP IBP), Distribution Centre closures and Product Substitutions can be achieved using Attribute Transformations.

Implementing a cloud solution today, even in an organisationally cloud aware environment, is still a daunting task. There are many requirements to ensure that a product is safe and secure to use, as well as ensuring it achieves the business benefits that are required.

This blog focusses on Challenges of SAP’s Integrated Business Planning (IBP) solution, a cloud based planning software, and tries to give pointers as to what to do when you develop your own clould migration strategy. The IT industry is still in a period of growth with cloud based solutions industry wide, so it’s quite important to consider any challenges that a company would face in implementing and using IBP operationally – this blog seeks to identify the 6 top challenges and see how IBP or SAP addresses these.

For those of you exposed to the full force of SAP marketing for SAP Integrated Business Planning, I’m sure you will have heard the phrase ‘financialising the plan’. But have you ever stopped to think about why this is beneficial and what this means in practice when it comes to implementing it in SAP IBP?

In this blog I intend to give an overview of SAP HANA^® Cloud Platform (HCP), integration services, and will also explain the integration steps and configuration required to integrate SAP Advanced Planning and Optimisation (APO) Demand Planning (DP) data with SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) using a pre-existing template.

It has become apparent to me during recent client conversations that the options available for implementing SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) for demand are unclear for many of our customers.  One of the underlying reasons for uncertainty in my opinion is however clear: SAP Advanced Planning and Optimisation (APO).  If you have already implemented APO, then your journey has probably been long and your system full of customisation, putting uncertainty as to what the timelines or benefits of actually implementing IBP for demand are.

In this blog I intend to highlight a number of different options on your journey to adopting IBP for demand.

In a previous blog (Should you be Demanding IBP?), I highlighted some of the high level differences between SAP APO Demand Planning and SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) for demand. 

With the impending release of IBP v6.3 due later this year, I intend to go under the bonnet of the IBP for demand statistical forecasting engine to see if all that glisters is really gold.