Planner Workspace: different users, one overview

Multiple tabs can make it difficult to visualize and interpret data – a universal truth among everyone who has ever opened Excel. That’s where the ‘Planner Workspace’ Fiori app comes in! It helps you organize and display your planning data clearly. Users can also combine their planning views with different types of charts in a single overview, on a single page.

With the 2202 release, SAP continues to improve the Planner Workspace tool with more options to meet the different business users’ requirements:

additional comparison, distribution, and trend chart types
detailed drill-down and analysis functions for your data
multiple appearance settings to display your key figures
the option to add reason codes and comments when changing data

And Excel fans? They can still use the spreadsheet UI within SAP. So everybody’s happy!

Shared Analytics & Dashboards

Need to visualize data for your reports? SAP IBP provides different charts in the ‘Analytics’ app, which can be transformed into clear dashboards.

Before, it was difficult to create, maintain and improve those charts in the Analytics app across different company departments. As part of the latest release, this issue is now resolved with the ‘Shared Editability’ Feature.

Besides the standard ‘read-access’, both read and write access can now be provided directly to multiple users or user groups. So different business users can easily work together on making charts and dashboards for reporting or analyzing purposes. A significant collaboration improvement!

New Planning Objects

When introducing new products (NPI) in a Demand Planning process, you need to create new planning objects for them and their relevant combinations in SAP IBP. Creating these new planning objects is becoming easier and more user-friendly with each upgrade – this one included.

From now on, planning objects are easily created in a separate view. With the Excel-like spreadsheet, users can get assistance from existing Master Data combinations to improve consistency and to validate those newly created objects or combinations. In addition to that:

users will have the option to load planning objects from existing master-data types;
the app offers better insights and history tracking for all manual actions;
additional selection and filtering options are provided.

VBA Extension possibilities

Extending standard solutions is key in tailoring them to the specific and ever-evolving needs of different customers. With IBP 2202, SAP provides even more APIs to make basic functions of the Excel add-in accessible through Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) coding. In practice, this means two things.

Templates will become more user-friendly, increasing efficiency and making planning easier.
Tailor made functions will streamline the IBP workflow in Excel.

Keen to know more about the technical implications?

Contact our IBP specialist

MRO process fueled by EAM integration

Finally, there were some interesting improvements to the Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO) process. In asset-intensive industries, a gap between supply planning and maintenance planning often results in supply chain disruptions.

Starting February 19th, preconfigured content is delivered to SAP IBP, containing the end-to-end integration of asset-management master data from SAP EAM. Based on templates in SAP Cloud Integration to easily define data flows, a dedicated planning area specifically for MRO is created. Overall, the integration allows customers to retrieve their asset data quickly from plant maintenance and bring it into SAP IBP. There, they can model the according MRO processes in the predefined planning area.

These adjustments will contribute to a better integration of Demand, Maintenance and Supply plans. As a result, customers can capture their maintenance parts and workforce demand, and combine them with adequate forecasting possibilities. In that way, SAP IBP harmonizes Demand and Supply planning once more.

Do you have your SAP IBP roadmap ready for 2022? Our experts help you get started!

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