Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP)

Supply chain planning aims to create a sales plan coordinated between sales and production, which also takes into account the coverage of the resulting requirements.

To put it more precisely: where are which stocks located, which suppliers can be used to deliver the required materials and when? This is to ensure that the established planning can be implemented smoothly in practice.

For a company that uses SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), it is advisable to also carry out supply chain planning in an SAP solution as part of an integrated process. If sales planning is not integrated into SAP, it is much more difficult to incorporate the current status of the company into the planning. For example, changes in stock levels, changes to orders and production orders or simply rescheduling an order can make it necessary to plan again.

SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP)

SAP IBP solves this task comprehensively - both in terms of functional scope and integration into SAP ERP.

The IBP Demand application offers the widest range of algorithms to support the creation of sales plans, including forecasts and lifecycle planning.
On the other hand, the Response & Supply application enables the calculation of cross-plant demand coverage as well as a comprehensive (real-time) insight into the supply chain - i.e. into stocks, availability, delivery times, etc. - so that it is possible to react as early as possible in the event of problems occurring.
The IBP Sales & Operations Planning application, on the other hand, combines the majority of the functions available in the two applications described in one application (simple licensing) and is completely sufficient for the vast majority of medium-sized companies.

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