Is your Outlier Correction outstanding?

Introduction Outlier correction is commonly perceived as a necessary but tiresome, recurring task for a demand planner. The advantages of performing the outlier correction as a pre-processing step in the Forecasting process are nevertheless evident: You would get more clarification on which portion of your demand history is due to special marketing activities (promotions, price changes, etc.) of your company or your competitors. You won’t need to define your forecasting […]

Continue Reading

Working with Aggregated Constraints

Aggregated constraints are a useful feature in SAP IBP when you would like to control the supply and capacity planning not on a detail level but on an aggregated level. As an example: you have four production lines in your company which can manufacture the same output product but with different throughput rates. Your main restriction is the number of skilled employees available per day or shift to operate the […]

Continue Reading

Supply Heuristic Parameters

Introduction This  blog is intended to describe the parameters of the IBP Supply Heuristic with focus on the heuristic type “Infinite without shortages”. Allowed Quota Deviation Here you can relax the heuristic a little bit with the intention to tolerate any irregular quota definitions in the Location Source. The tolerance interval is nevertheless restricted by SAP to a value between 0 and 0.1, meaning it allows a sum of quotas […]

Continue Reading

SAP IBP Alerts with Machine Learning

Introduction Planning processes in SAP IBP using Machine Learning (ML) algorithms such as are included in the SAP HANA Predictive Analysis Library (PAL) do exist up to current IBP release yet to a manageable extent. The obvious spots in IBP where Machine learning plays a role are Clustering of Alerts with ML clustering algorithms Forecasting Model Gradient Boosting of Decision Trees Before we go into the details of above mentioned […]

Continue Reading

Modelling Demand Bill of Materials in SAP IBP

Introduction In various business scenarios – especially in the Make-to-Order (MTO) process environment – there is the requirement to model demand planning quantities for the critical parts in the lower levels of the bills of material (e.g. semi-finished goods, purchased components). In SAP’s preceding supply chain planning tool SAP APO there are several commonly known options to match this specific business requirement, e.g.: Generating so-called Demand Planning Bill of Materials […]

Continue Reading

Time-Series Based Solvers in SAP IBP (I): an analysis

Introduction In the typical Sales & Operations planning process (S&OP), the Sales, Finance and Operations Departments first agree on a common Forecast for the different products (or products families) and Customers (or regions). This forecast is known as (unconstrained) Consensus Forecast). The subsequent step consists in executing the Supply Planning. In this step, the supply planner creates an high level supply plan and determines – if possible – the feasibility […]

Continue Reading

New Product Introduction Made Easy

During SAP APO times the maintenance of Product Lifecycles, Phase-in or Phase-out profiles including Like modelling has been very cumbersome. In most customer projects we experienced that the available functionality in APO did by far not match with the business requirements, so customer developments had been very likely. The App in SAP IBP for Product Lifecycle Management means a big step forward in terms of comprehensiveness and usability. This article […]

Continue Reading