SAP IBP Release 2208 – 5 features to revolutionize your planning workload

Introducing the ‘Manage Historical States’ app

What? The brand-new ‘Manage Historical States’ application in the SAP IBP web interface helps users easily archive and restore old states of their planning areas.

What’s new?

• In the past, historical states were removed by default after a certain period. By manually archiving (a) certain state(s), users can now prevent these from being deleted and save the configuration in a planning area as it was at a particular point in time.
• The app also makes it easy to review historical states, compare different instances, quickly detect changes within a planning area, and effortlessly restore older states whenever necessary.

Your advantage? Peace of mind! If you’re struggling with a new go-live or a change in the production system where your latest updates do not seem to work as planned, there’s no more need to panic! From now on, simply revert to an older state of the planning area that was working perfectly, while buying time to investigate the issue at hand.

Value-based filters in Planner Workspaces

What? Planners can now use value-based filters in their Planner Workspaces to find relevant planning data.

What’s new? Previously, users were required to work in the Excel UI of SAP IBP when applying value-based filters to planning objects. From now on, this option is also available in the web-based Planner Workspace.

Your advantage? More concise planning views, as you only see the values that you specifically want to analyse within your system. Want to exclude empty values or limit the range you view? Feel free. On top of that, you can also specify the time periods for which the value-based filter should be considered.

Check out how this SAP IBP 2208 feature works:

Enhancement to ‘Simulate Key Figure Calculations’ app

What? The ‘Simulate Key Figure Calculations’ app introduced by SAP in May now allows the manual entry of data from outside the live system.

What’s new? When running a calculation simulation in the past, data came from the ‘live/active’ system. Now, users can also enter trial data manually to check the correctness of the simulations and see the direct impact on the outcome.

Your advantage? Significant time savings, as you can create and run simulations without having to activate the planning area over and over again.

Support native Excel sorting functionality

What? Better native Excel sorting functionality in the planning view.

What’s new? So far, when sorting data in the Excel interface, the order of the attributes changed and objects were no longer correctly shown in the planning views. Now you can sort data (e.g. from highest to lowest) using the Excel functionality in the ‘Data’ ribbon.

Your advantage? It is easy to sort your data and monitor changes.

Native sorting will be further enhanced in upcoming releases, e.g. to deal with multiple key figures in a planning view. Stay tuned!

Disaggregation based on Calculated Key Figure

What? A new rule that allows you to disaggregate values based on the calculated value of another key figure.

What’s new? When entering or loading data on a higher level, this data needs to come down to the lowest level on which a key figure is saved. Disaggregation of data in other words. Until now, there were limited rules on how to disaggregate key figure values. SAP now allows the ‘disaggregation of key figure values in proportion with the calculated values of another key figure’.

Your advantage? A simplified planning area set-up and user processes, as some ‘intermediately’ stored key figures used for the disaggregation are unnecessary. So, in the future, if you are keen to use last year’s key figure values as a proportionality factor, they can be defined on an identical or different base planning level.