SAP IBP 2111 : Top 10 for Consulting Community

[former_member592774]

Hello IBP Folks,

As you might be already aware that following the quarterly development and release cadence SAP released SAP IBP 2111 on 28^th Oct 2021. A glimpse the released was shared  via a blog by Thomas Klemm from SAP  . If you have not read through I would insist you to read through the same here.

There are some really powerful features covered in this released ranging from enhancements in Planner workspace, Intelligent Visibility , ML usage in Data integration checks , Shelf Life Distribution planning to The most awaited Real Time Integration. The list goes much beyond this. In case you want to go through recordings of the webinars you can find it here.

In this blog I picked some of the features which I feel are directly helpful from Consulting community point of view. As consultants we are always the first people to analyze , review and implement the new functionalities in order to get best out of the planning solution.

1. Value Based Filters in Copy Operator Profile : During our consulting projects we are often asked by clients to provide us the ways to copy the data between two Key Figures based on certain value conditions. For example – We want to avoid copying null values to target  key figure and this filed in copy operator will definitely serve this purpose.

2. Upload Planning Area ,configurations : This feature would definitely save a lot of time for implementation partners to build a use cases across and perform the proof of concept and use the same for a quick deployment into clients environment. It would definitely give a good starting point.

3. Planning Filters Transport to Production Tenant : A small yet useful feature which can again save quite some time if the planning filters are heavily used by the project users.

      4. Aggregation Mode – Standard Deviation : Next to the available agg modes in SAP IBP:       AVG, SUM, MIN, MAX, COUNT , A new agg mode as STDDEV has been introduced . This can come  handy at many times to consultant to quickly calculate the STDDEV and avoid complex extra config  work. Example

STDDEVAGGRQTY@REQUEST = STDDEV("ACTUALQTY@MTHPRODLOC")

5. Aggregation of Different Key Figures : With 2111 it becomes possible to define the aggregation of a different key figure  to another Key Figure. This also reduces the extra work of creating helper KFs to first assign the aggregation and then use them in other calculations.

6. Application Logs for Master Data Changes in Work Book : Often time we are asked by business to track the records added/changed directly in master data workbooks. With 2111 it becomes possible and a new application logs can be generated for this changes.

7. Opt-in and Opt-Out for Custom Alerts : In case business users doesn’t want to keep notified for any subscribed alerts due to change in roles and responsibilities , we can now advise them to make use of this Opt-in and Op- Out feature.

8. Sharing Write access for Custom Alerts : Another good feature for us as administrator is having possibilities to give write access for all creates alert definition so in case of any changes needed by business we need not copy the alerts and created a new one instead the same can be done by others users of admin team. This is very small yet useful addition.

9. Freeze Horizon : With 2111 release it becomes possible to fix the receipts coming from your legacy system as fixed plan and all the TS Supply Algorithms ( TS based supply planning heuristic, the time-series-based supply planning finite heuristic, and the time-series-based supply planning optimizer) will respect them. This means the results within frozen horizon cant be less or more than the quantities coming from your execution system. This would help us as consultants again and avoid searching possibilities to fix the quantities.

The feature will be supported by having different key figures and attributes related to Freeze Horizon for each source of supply. Help Link here.

 

10. Some Good enhancements in TS Supply :
    
    
    
    1. Resource Consumption of Commonly used Resources : With 2111 , the already used capacities of commonly used resources can’t be used anymore if you are running optimizer in two different subnetworks.
    
    
    2. Tolerates Cycles in Supply Chain : Starting 2111 , The Infinite Heuristics can be configured to not result in failure of job and only issue a warning. This would save a lot of time in wasted in fixing the issue before the re-running the jobs can be done successfully.
    
    
    
    

As said earlier these are the ones picked by me which I think are really helpful for us to give best value to business out of the SAP IBP solution. All the other features from the release have their own business benefits. See the What’s New 2011 Help page here. Hope you like reading them through.

Let me know your feedback.

Regards,

Anurag