Modules of SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP)
SAP IBP has several modules covering various aspects of planning that can be used separately or in conjunction with one another. It’s a planning tool that integrates supply chain management, sales and operations planning, demand management, inventory planning, and supply planning. It provides businesses with a single-integrated technology solution to be used instead of adding more headcount to manage an already streamlined process.
Below, we outline the modules of SAP IBP:
Supply Chain Control Tower: Real-time control and monitoring of your supply chain. When faced with a decision, the Supply Chain Control Tower gives critical analysis to help you act rather than react.
Intelligent supply chain visibility: Visualize your supply chain by creating interactive maps, graphs, and charts that utilize live data.
What-if analysis and scenario comparison: Run simulations of demand or supply adjustments for what-if analysis and scenario comparison for quick, informed decisions.
Event-driven exception management: Define custom alerts to automatically identify deviations from the demand or supply plan and use playbooks to solve any problems.
Collaboration with the supply network: Work with suppliers and outsourced manufacturers to make planning easier and faster.
Sales and Operations: Develops a sales strategy to maximize business results per your company's goals.
Real-time planning: Align demand and supply, integrate financial and operational planning, and connect high-level strategic plans to mid-and long-term company strategies using real-time planning.
What-if analysis and scenario comparison: Run simulations of demand or supply changes for what-if analysis and scenario comparison for quick, informed decision-making.
Collaboration: Improve teamwork and efficiency in the planning process by breaking down operational and planning silos.
Performance monitoring: Compare actual performance to plans and keep an eye out for potential operational and strategic plan misalignment.
Forecasting and Demand: Machine Learning provides clear requirements projections for large-scale and long-term planning and forecasting, as well as transient changes.
Demand planning: Compare actual performance to plans and keep an eye out for potential operational and strategic plan mismatch.
Advanced demand sensing: Fine-tune short-term projections to improve fulfillment and reduce inventory.
Robust statistical models: Combining complex forecasting algorithms with machine learning and pre-and post-processing algorithms improves forecast accuracy.
Analysis of time series: Sort your products into categories based on the trends they've shown in the past, and then choose algorithms based on those categories.
Inventory Planning and Optimization: Stock objectives for the whole supply chain are optimized by taking into account supply and demand considerations.
Inventory optimization in stages: With multi-echelon inventory optimization, you can buffer supply chain risk and uncertainty with an unnecessary inventory.
Robust statistical models: Proven techniques provide significant advantages over textbook calculations.
Prediction error management: Protect your demand-driven supply chain by buffering against forecast error and other demand-side uncertainty.
Analytics in the cloud: Visualize your supply chain to get a rapid understanding of inventory drivers.
Response and Supply: This allows you to react to changes as they occur, assess restrictions, and run what-if scenarios.
Multi-level planning: Visualize your supply chain network and receive immediate insights into inventory drivers using multilevel planning.
Supply chain network visualization: Visualize your supply chain network and receive instant insights regarding inventory drivers.
Rough-cut capacity planning: Create a tactical rough-cut capacity plan that takes capacity and material limits into account at the same time.
Response management: Create an operational or order-based supply strategy that includes order allocations and repetitions depending on prioritization rules.
Demand-Driven Replenishment: Control the flow of material across the supply chain by using strategic decoupling points and inventory buffers.
Smooth material and information flow: Reduce supply chain nervousness by breaking the bottleneck.
Re-supply based on current demand: Break the supply chain's bullwhip impact and reduce supply chain anxiety.
Decoupled inventory buffers calculation: Determine the size of inventory buffer zones based on past material use or future estimates.
Inventory buffer zones: Determine the size of inventory buffer zones based on past material use or future estimates.
As you determine which SAP solution is best for your business, contact our team at Crescense for guidance.
Written by Clarkston Consulting’s Anand Nataraj, Jakul Shastri, and Charlie de Cardenas.