SAP IBP Integrated Business Planning
Supply chain planning is one of the most important issues affecting the cash flow and sales of companies. For many years, companies have been estimating sales and trying to make purchasing, replenishment and/or production plans based on these estimates. As companies grow and products diversify, it’s nearly impossible to do this without the help of a program. We used to hear about APO projects in global companies, and in recent years we have seen estimation and allocation made in domestic companies implementing local or other global planning softwares. Some companies, with the support of big software teams, tried to rediscover America, that is, to develop such software themselves. While some of them are successful, the majority cannot be said to have achieved significant success. As you can appreciate, inhouse developed softwares cannot compete with global ones which were developed by industry experience.
In parallel with this, we can say that SAP has transformed the Advanced planning optimizer (APO) product, which it has positioned as a supply chain planning program for years and that works on Premise, into the SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) product, which runs On Memory and Cloud. In short, IBP is the next generation Cloud-based end-to-end supply chain planning product. Like S/4, IBP consists of modules and licensing(or subscription) is done through the modules used. So what are IBP modules and what are their scopes;
Demand Management (Demand): It allows you to make short-medium-long-term demand forecasts by using different and flexible forecasting models. This is the basis of planning, because all other plans are made according to the forecast.
Sales and Operational Planning (SOP): It is a module that aims to deliver customer orders on time and increase forecast accuracy, taking into account constraints such as financial constraints, capacity and lead times.
Supply Management (Response and Supply): It is a module that allows tactical and operational changes to be reflected in plans with shorter-term planning.
Inventory Management: It is a module that enables financial optimization of stocks, reducing costs and increasing customer order fulfillment rates.
Supply Chain Control Tower: It is the module where all data are reported, visualized and/or create alert mechanisms. In other words, it is the module where you see the entire planning process and results with real time data
