Businesses in the manufacturing and distribution sectors require an agile supply chain solution, which equips them to effectively deal with rapidly changing market dynamics and disruptions, along with fulfilling rising customer requirements. Conventional supply chain solutions, which are disparate and poorly integrated can no longer equip businesses with the required digital maturity to stay competitive.
A study by KPMG indicates that in 2024, around 50% of businesses using a supply chain process will invest in new solutions that include artificial intelligence and enhanced analytical capabilities. In addition, there is an increased demand for Generative AI-driven supply chain solutions, which reduce manually driven processes, provide greater accuracy, and enable even novice users to use the application.
You also get the advantage of extending the functionality of your SAP IBP suite with SAP-certified third-party applications, APIs, and pre-packaged integrations.
SAP IBP analyses multiple sources of data and transactional patterns and provides real-time AI-driven insights that help decision-makers take the right approach to ensure that dynamic demand forecasts are adequately met.
Key approaches in SAP IBP include Curve-Based Forecasting for improving accuracy and Range Forecasting for Automated Exponential Smoothing which help in dealing with volatile demand.
SAP IBP leverages the immense potential of Machine Learning to uncover deep master data patterns and gives recommendations for validating and correcting existing data. Users get the ability to handle master data with a high level of personalization, both for current and future scenarios.
SAP IBP comes with a Service Level Prediction operator that predicts customer service levels based on geo-location and a defined stock plan. This feature helps forecast future scenarios, the customer service level, and the impact on the revenue, thereby accentuating your customer service processes.
SAP IBP provides a unified platform for financial and real-time operational planning so that you can align your inventory stock levels for increased profitability. It facilitates easy collaboration and provides advanced data-driven insights such as Predictive Analytics and What-If analysis.
SAP IBP integrated business planning offers advanced statistical insights that provide demand sensing, time-series analysis, and planning capabilities that analyze trends and patterns to improve order fulfilment and build a robust and resilient supply chain process.
SAP IBP facilitates supply chain analysis across various locations and multiple bills of materials and factors both capacity and material constraints. You also get the advantage of creating order or operation-based supply plans and setting priorities for order fulfilment.
Using disparate and legacy applications for your entire supply chain operations decreases the optimal level of visibility that you need. With SAP IBP, you get complete insights into every aspect of your supply chain process, with standardized data models, real-time simulation, trend comparison, exception management, and increased collaboration with your supply chain partners.
With every new technology implementation, end-user adoption, adding new features and customization can become quite challenging. SAP IBP integrates with Joule-the SAP Copilot so that users can enter natural language prompts that are processed to give the required output. Joule makes using SAP IBP simpler for even novice users, thereby increasing user adoption and ensuring accessibility without in-depth technical knowledge.
With the above set of features, SAP IBP can streamline, optimize, innovate, and optimize your existing supply chain operations and accelerate your path towards digital transformation. Let’s look at the components of SAP IBP and their native capabilities that provide the above-mentioned features.
By leveraging the immense potential of SAP IBP, you get the advantage of optimized processes, and real-time and deep-data analytics for better decision-making and makes your business stay ahead in the competitive race. The modular structure of SAP IBP enables you to implement the required components as per your business requirements, while the cloud-based deployment gives you the much-needed flexibility and scalability to add or remove components as per your operational requirements.
