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SAP IBP 2005 Release: Sneak Preview

SAP product team continues to work on, and add functionality to, SAP IBP on a quarterly basis to ensure its customers have a solution that is up-to-date. SAP came out with their latest release – 2005 release – of IBP, and our consultants have selected a few key highlights from the 2005 release that may be of interest to you. We’ve also bucketed the key highlights to “Business” and “Technical” topics based on whom they are most likely to impact:

Topics relevant to the business users – new features that are functional in nature, and of interest particularly to Business users

Topics relevant to the IT community – new features that are technical in nature, and of interest to consultants and IT teams

Topics relevant to the business users

Improvements in Change Point Detection

The calculation of trend slopes within the Forecast Automation Run has been changed to allow for more effective change point detection. The Demand Planners will be able to leverage these improvements in the set up of Forecast Models that include multiple linear regression and Auto-ARIMAX/SARIMAX algorithms to obtain more accurate forecasts. A new global configuration parameter can be used to specify how many of the most recent change points should be considered by these algorithms.

Product Lifecycle can now be set up using aggregated level definitions

In the Manage Product Lifecycle app, you can now define product references and forecast dates on an aggregated product level, for example, product group or product family. This will facilitate the handling of scenarios where several products are replaced by one, or a group of products may be replaced by another group of products. There are scenarios when life cycle of products is too short, even less than three months, like fashion industry or different presentations of CPG. In these cases, it is a common practice to forecast demand at product group level instead of at product level.

Optimization in Deployment Run

Business rules currently used in Deployment are not the flexible enough to handle some complex scenarios. The Deployment run can now leverage a cost-based optimization, which opens new possibilities to the business. Implementing a cost-based optimization is not a simple process. It requires a good analysis to start with, contact Bizbrain for additional information.

New Echelon ID in Inventory Optimization

An echelon is an Inventory layer within a supply chain. Release 2005 now adds the Echelon ID to help identify the segments of the network from the point of view of Inventory Optimization. This will streamline the navigation of the results of the Inventory Optimization, allowing a better understanding of the internal service drivers and safety stock drivers.

Topics relevant to the IT community

Data Integration Using RFC-Enabled Function Modules

Outbound integration with ODATA and web-services had poor performance and had a limitation in the data volume that could be transferred, and fixing issues was time consuming as it involved multiple teams which resulted in delay in business planning cycle. Using RFC enabled function modules will help streamline the integration and allow for larger volumes of data to be integrated into SAP S/4 HANA.

Normalization

SAP introduced infrastructure improvements of the data model to improve performance, memory utilization, scalability and overall robustness of IBP. All existing customers (provisioned before release 1908), will need to focus on migration to the Normalized Data Model. That means that there will be an additional regression testing effort on top of one already dedicated to upgrades. One of the items to focus is the configuration of attributes as Key Figure, which will have a limit of 1 million entires in time series.

Any customer who got system provisioned from version 1908 onwards will have their data model already Normalized. SAP is working on migration tools and all customers will be migrated between Q3 2020 and Q4 2021. SAP will contact your Administrator to schedule your migration.

Restart Application Jobs and Chains

Currently, if an application job or chain fails, the only option we have is to create another application job with the remaining steps that could not be executed. The new release will bring operational efficiencies by enabling the possibility of restarting the remaining steps without having to create a new application job.