Forecasting is a vital cog in effective business planning be it forecasts of stock requirements or call volumes of a call center.

Obtaining the seasonal , trend and cyclic components or decomposing the time series data can provide insights into the business analysis for enterprise functions varying from sales forecasting, demand planning or customer satisfaction. Sharing a data product http://ohrivikas.weebly.com/forecasting.html which provides these insights.

Learning from the past data patterns to extrapolate the future predictions  and at the same time ignoring random data or data that is unlikely to repeat is the key for useful forecasting.

Time series data like sales data of quantities of items units sold can be regarded as comprising of a seasonal component, a trend-cycle (contains both trend & cycle) component and anything else regarded as remainder component. These components can be model as additive or multiplicative  i.e. they add up or multiply to constitute the time series data.

Time series  data  for example Product Units Sold per month can exhibit a huge variety of trends, seasonality and cyclic patterns  in the data. Business analysts are continuously trying to identify factors causing Change  ( either increase or decrease) in direction of trend.It is useful to extract those patterns to understand the business and improve forecasts. Since Forecast is a prediction of values in future , it is useful to attribute a confidence interval around these values . Shared below is link to application i created for quick visual analysis of time series data . Forecasting of your enterprise data with Exponential smoothing and Seasonal and Trend decomposition using Loess  can be done as well Time series decomposition by this tool.

http://ohrivikas.weebly.com/forecasting.html

Past 25 years of monthly utility average price of California have been already included to study the data, from  data source U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) .  Monthly trends plots show power prices have increased in summer months by providing the increase or decrease of average monthly values compared to data average. Currently it can also accept, spreadsheet .XLSX format with ,monthly periodic data of uni variate time series for data analysis purposes, as shown in the table picture below.

Using Native ECC & Netweaver tools creating time series data like quantities of product sold by time period (say monthly),  as shown in above table  is fairly easy and commonly available in out of the box reports.

Few terms that may help the reader & user are explained below.

A trend exists when there is a long-term increase or decrease in the data. It does not need to be linear. A seasonal pattern exists when a series is influenced by seasonal factors (e.g., the quarter of the year, the month, or day of the week). Seasonality is always of a fixed and known period.A cyclic pattern exists when data exhibit rises and falls that are not of fixed period over a fairly long time periods usually in years. Average length of cycles is longer than the length of a seasonal pattern . Seasonally adjusted data is if the seasonal component is removed from the original data.

Importantly note, although in the data product  http://ohrivikas.weebly.com/forecasting.html , exponential forecasting option automatically chooses best fitting model, there are several  models or methods to do forecasting , which one to use is essentially determined by the data characteristics and out of sample accuracy testing .

On the Help Portal, a documentation update is available for SAP Integrated Business Planning 4.0 Feature Pack 1 Patch 2 (http://help.sap.com/IBP40).

Check the What’s New – Release Notessection to find out what’s new in patch 2.

The Model Configuration Guide and the Data Export Guide (formerly called “API guide”) have been reworked as well.

This post will be used for ongoing SAP customer communications related to SAP Integrated Business Planning upgrades.

For Upgrade Process and Communication information please see this link.

Please note: Current SAP Integrated Business Planning customers will be upgraded to 5.1 when it is released (planned for Q3 2015).

Upgrade/Patch NOTIFICATION forSAP Integrated Business Planning:

Webinar Recording

Topic:

Tyson Foods Demand Planning Best Practices and SAP S&OP

Presenters:

Samantha Biedron

Senior Manager, Process Improvement and Planning Solutions

Alison Maxwell

Sr Manager Supply Planning at Hillshire Brands

Agenda:

• Implementation Overview
• Demand Planning Best Practices
• Design and Implementation of Forecast Key Drivers

Feel free to ask questions in the comments section. The Tyson team will be happy to address them.

Thank you Tyson Team!

WEBINAR RECORDING LINK

SAP sample planning areas can be very useful as a reference when one is performing modeling in IBP. They can also be leveraged when troubleshooting. In a two part blog I will outline how to copy the SAP4 sample planning area, how to activate it and finally how to load it with data, In this first segment, will outline how to copy and activate SAP4. Next time, in part 2, I'll detail how to load the planning area with data in.

PREREQUISITES:

Ensure that you are at a minimum IBP server version of 4.0.1.2

PERFORM THE COPY:

In order to see the samples, go to the Planning Area and Details screen and select Display SAP Sample

In this example, I am copying SAP4.

1) Select SAP4

2) Click the Copy button

3) Select Advanced Copy

4) Enter SAP4 or however you’d like to name your new planning area

5) Pick an available Target Time Profile ID - I’m using 44

6) Enter S4 for source prefix

7) I’ve decided to stick with S4 for target prefix as well

8) Select Copy

Now change from Display SAP Sample to Edit Active and Inactive and you’ll now see SAP4 listed as inactive.

ACTIVATE THE TIME PROFILE:

1) Ensure that you have Edit Active and Inactive selected

2) Choose your time profile on the left

3) Since I’ll be using a 10 year time profile, I edit the description, Start Date and End Date as shown

4) Save the changes by clicking on the floppy disc icon

5) Select Activate and choose only your Time Profile (in my case 44) and click Activate

6) Confirm that the Time Profile now shows as active (you can monitor the log or just wait a few seconds and click the refresh button in the IBP Web Ui)

ACTIVATE THE MASTER DATA TYPES:

1) Navigate to the Master Data Types tab

2) Select S4COMPONENT

3) Select Activate

4) Select all the S4 objects. You will need to scroll on the right side to find them all

5) Select the Activate Dependent Master Data Types check box

6) Click Activate

7) It will take some time but once the activation has completed, you’ll see all the MD types with S4 prefix (example S4COMPONENT) will now be marked as active

PRE-ACTIVATION CORRECTION:

Navigate to the Key Figures tab and ensure you have Planning Area SAP4 selected.

Select the Key Figure ADJUSTEDDEMAND. There is an error. If you look below, you can see that ADJUSTEDDEMAND is misspelled and missing a D.

Click the pencil to edit the calculation.

Edit the calculation to read as SUM("ADJUSTEDDEMAND@PERPRODLOC")

Click the check button and then ok.

The calculation should now look as below

Click the save button (floppy disc)

ACTIVATING THE PLAN AREA:

Now navigate to the Planning Area and Details tab and ensure that you have the SAP4 Planning Area selected. Click on the Activate button and then click activate again.

Your planning area should now be active

You can find part 2 HERE

This is part two of a two part blog. In this portion, we’ll load some sample data into SAP4. The first part of the blog can be found HERE.

Note: the files for the data load are located HERE

LOAD THE TIME PROFILE:

1) Select the Data Integration tab

2) Click on the New Import Job button

3) Select Time Period for data types

4) Choose the file TP4new2.csv

5) Hit OK

LOAD THE MASTER DATA:

1) Click on the New Import Job button

2) Select Master Data for Data Type

3) Choose Customer (S4CUSTOMER) for Data Name

4) Select CUSTOMER_BC.csv then click OK.

5) Once completed, you should see green indicating success.

You’ll need to repeat the steps and load in the following order. For the second load, you’ll change step 3 to Location and then in step 4 select the Location csv file.

S4Customer

S4Location

S4Product

S4Resource

S4LocationProduct

S4ResourceLocation (LocationResource csv)

S4CustomerProduct (ProductCustomer csv)

S4SourceCustomer

S4SourceLocation

S4ProductionResource (PRESOURCE_BC.csv)

S4SourceProduction (PHEADER_BC.csv)

S4ProductionSourceItem (PDETAILS_BC.csv)

LOAD THE KEY FIGURES:

1) Click on the New Import Job button

2) Select Key Figures for Data Type

3) Choose the SAP4 planning area

4) Choose CUSTOMERRATIO_KF_BC.csv and hit OK

Repeat steps 1-4 for the final 3 KF csv files.

You should see something like below:

You have now successfully copied, activated and loaded SAP4.

IBP Partner Lounge Series

The goal of the IBP Partner Lounge meeting series is to support consultants who are currently implementing IBP Solution, creating POCs or Custom Demos and to build a Partner Community where the consultants can share project experiences, help each other and discuss solutions and best practices. Partners have an opportunity to connect with IBP Product and Solution Management team and learn about new Product features, releases, share requirements from Customers and have a Q&A session.

IBP Partner Lounge is not intended to provide product training, rather the intention is to provide guidance and support on detailed application questions / issues which arise during projects.Consultants should come to the meeting prepared with questions and documentation and send these questions before the call.

Following is the Agenda for the Partner Lounge calls.

1. Solution Updates – Upcoming Events, Customer Updates, etc
2. Product Updates – Releases, Features and Functions
3. Special Topic – From Consultants / Product Team
4. Partners Round Table of Project Updates – Share learnings and experiences
5. Q&A with Product Team

IBP Partner Lounge occurs once a Month on Wednesdays from 9am-10am PST on sapconnect web session

Hosted by IBP Product Managers: Raghav Jandhyala (raghav.jandhyala@sap.com) and Pramod Mane (Pramod.mane@sap.com).

This series started last year and we have more than 15 active Partner Companies participating.

If you are IBP Partner and would like to join the series, please contact Priya Wenzel (priya.wenzel@sap.com)

We want Partners to present and share content in this call. Please let Pramod/Raghav know about the topics you would like to present.

As we searched YouTube and other sources for specific information on specific topic concerning IBP S&OP, we found very little.  So we decided to start a video series on specific IBP topics.  Below is the first video in the series speaking to Inventory Targets and Projections in IBP.  Please feel free to comment on the information presented and also feel free to comment on this blog post entry on topics you might like to see in the future.  Enjoy!

SAP IBP S&OP 3 Inventory Target and Projections

Individual Videos List:

Playlist of all videos:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAsfIWNMtZU6AcdYud_fdmckbxQFCKHQz

As always, you can go to scmconnections.com for more information, blog posts, webinars, and lot more information.

Introduction

To find the cost-optimal solution, the optimizer transforms the IBP for Supply model into a mathematical representation. This representation is called Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP, see also Linear programming - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). This MILP can be solved to a mathematical proven optimal solution. A basic understanding of these MILPs is required for the further explanations.

Continuous variables

The variables in the model resemble the decisions, material flows and inventory-situation in the Supply plan:

• Production: each possible production gets its own variable, which equals the produced amount of the main output-product. For each period and production (P-rule) combination one variable is required.
• Transport: each possible transport inside the network or to a customer requires an own variable. They equal the transported amount of a distinct product over a transport-lane. For each period and transport C- and T-rules) one variable is required.
• External receipt/procurement: for each period and external receipt (U-rule) one variable is used to define the amount of procured material.
• Demand: for each consensus demand a variable resembles the satisfied amount. A helper variable with the non-delivered amount (demand quantity minus the satisfied amount) is used to penalize the non-deliveries in the objective function.
• Inventory: for each period, product and location-combination one variable reflects the current inventory level.

Binary variables

Currently two features of the model require binary decisions:

1. Minimum lot-sizes on transport and production: the optimizer needs to decide to transport resp. produce 0 or at least the minimum lot-size amount. Therefore a binary variable is required for each period to represent this decision.
2. Fix costs: similar to the minimum lot-sizes a decision variable is required for the fix costs in each period.

As binary (and integer) variables have a high impact on the MILP-solver runtime, it is recommended to avoid them as far as possible. By setting the discretization horizon in the optimizer profile it is possible to limit these binary decisions to the first periods in the planning horizon:

Constraints

The constraints in the mathematical model combine the variables with the business-logic of the Supply model:

• Stock-Balance equation: this equation ensures the integrity of the inventory level. It also ensures the correct material-flow and satisfaction of the bill-of-material for the Production-rules, as the same variables are used in the different equations. For each period, product and location combination it looks like this:
  inventory-level in period n =
      inventory-level in period n-1 // carry-over of previous period
      + incoming transports         // all transport arriving in this period
      + production receipts         // production-receipts (as main product or co-product)
      + external receipt            // procured amount
      - outgoing transports         // all transport leaving in this period
      - production component usage  // used amount for production of other products
• Resources: for all resources and periods a constraint ensures that the capacity of the resource is not exceeded:
  sum of resource-usages <= resource-capacity
• Adjusted and minimum values: These values set resp. restrict some of the decision variables. But as they can't be satisfied in all cases (e.g. due to missing material) they are modelled as semi-hard (often also called pseudo-hard) constraints. This avoids infeasibilities in the mathematical model. Due to very high costs for violations of these constraints they are usually all fulfilled.

Objective function

As our model is cost-based, the objective is of course to minimize these costs. Consequently the objective function contains all costs:

Objective function =

  all non-delivery variable costs

  + all transport variable costs

  + all transport fix costs

  + all production variable costs

  + all production fix costs

  + all external receipt variable costs

  + all external receipt fix costs

  + all inventory holding variable costs

  + all inventory target violation variable costs

  + all maximum inventory violation variable costs

Variable costs are based on the corresponding amount of the product. Sometimes they are also called rate costs.

Example: variable costs for transport of product P1 from location L1 to location L2 are 0.001 in period 3. If an amount of 100 is transported in this period, this results in 100 * 0.001 additional costs in the objective function.

Fix costs arise if an amount is greater than 0, but are independent of the amount itself.

Example: fix costs for transport of product P1 from location L1 to location L2 are 1.5 in period 2. If any amount greater than 0 is transported in this period, this results in additional costs of 1.5 in the objective function.

Note: The different cost-types can be multiplied with global cost-factors set in the optimizer profile:

Example: by setting the global cost-factor for External Receipt Variable Cost to a small value (e.g. 0.001), it is possible to check if the procurement costs hinder demand-satisfaction.

In the message-protocol the different parts of the objective function in the solution can be seen:

Additionally the objective function value and its bound are displayed. In some cases (e.g. decomposition used) the bound is not available.

Conclusion

This rough description hopefully eases the usage of the optimizer in IBP for Supply. Please let me know if further questions on this topic arise. Also please note that further blogs concerning the optimizer are planned during the next months.

SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) Gets Widespread Coverage at Sapphire

There will be many different sessions at Sapphire related to SAP Integrated Business Planning applications.

Don’t get overwhelmed! Check out the Agenda builder to plan your trip more effectively!

Why is everyone excited about SAP Integrated Business Planning?

SAP got it right:

• Easy to Consume Cloud Based Delivery– Systems are deployed within 4 days without any help from the IT department
• MS Excel User Interface – Planners and Sales Teams who provide forecasting input know and love the flexibility of MS Excel.
• Collaboration – Reduce the number of emails you get and keep the conversation around Supply Chain Planning moving at the speed of the Social Enterprise.
• Analytics– Insightful analytics highlight key areas to focus on and provide for easy drill down analysis.
• HANABackend - Customers have a need for speed.
• Optimization – Inventory Optimization and Demand Sensing Algorithms drive down working capital and improve customer service.

Click here to learn more about IBP

What you will see at Sapphire related to IBP:

Industry Demo Pods will focus on SAP Integrated Business Planning: High Tech, Chemicals, Mining Industry, Consumer, and Automotive. Hear how SAP Integrated Business Planning has driven real customer value. We are really excited that we can share actual customer stories on how SAP customers have consumed the SAP Integrated Business Planning applications across so many different industries.

SAP Partners are really jazzed about the power of IBP and they want to show you how they helped their clients with IBP. Check out their IBP demos and stories at their booths. Some of the partners you will see include: EY, Cap Gemini, PwC, Intrigo Systems, Bristlecone, SCMConnections, BizBrain, TCS, Accenture, and Deloitte.

Lots of IBP Customers

There will also be many customer sessions including customer panels and presentations discussing their IBP implementations. Hear from Colgate, Albemarle, and American Sugar Refining.  Come ready with your questions!

Supply Chain Executive Networking

Network till you drop!

For example:

• EY and SAP are hosting an invitation only Supply Chain Executive Women’s breakfast.
• Westernacher is hosting a Supply Chain networking event at the Ice Bar.

Hope you are able to make it to Sapphire to learn more about how SAP Integrated Business Planning can help you!

Safe Travels!

Related Post: Top 5 sessions for Supply Chain Planners at SAPPHIRE NOW 2015

The Business Problem

Buy low sell high! Not so easy with complex finished good definition and planning.

 
In the mill products industry, the same raw material or WIP (like steel or cable wire of a certain grade) can be used to produce multiple finished products. Furthermore, the companies that need to balance the demand and supply for their end products sometimes end up needing to buy or sell WIP from or to the open market (like billets and blooms). However, most times these decisions are based on a rule of thumb or tribal knowledge, rather than solid data.

The Solution to the Problem

Maximize your profit using real time data driven decisions based on the latest cost and market prices.

A planning tool which can do quick what-if analysis and advise the business users on the most profitable product mix while considering the demand priorities and supply constraints would be ideal for such a situation.

SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) for Sales and Operations Planning (SOP) does the trick. With its single data model for demand, supply and finance on a highly intuitive and user friendly web or Excel interface powered by the power of HANA, SAP IBP for Sales and Operations can help Mill companies quickly make these critical business decisions.

SAP IBP Sales and Operations enables customers to model different costs, prices and constraints based on various supply chain models. These models can be used in different scenarios to compare the results to maximize profitability while creating a feasible supply plan. SAP IBP for sales and operations also enables the different stakeholders like finance, demand planners, supply planners and executives to explore options, socialize the point of views and come to a consensus decisions using JAM, SAP’s built in collaboration platform.

Celluloso Arauco overcomes their challenges with IBP sales and operations

Celluloso Arauco leveraged SAP IBP for sales and operations to streamline their forecasting process enabling them to perform what-if scenario analysis and strategic planning. They decreased data consolidation time from 7 to 2 days.

Diego de la Maza, Arauco’s Supply Chain Director said: “SAP´s Integrated Business Planning for sales and operations solution helped us to improve our data quality and shorten our planning cycle considerably, leaving us more time for Analysis and Scenarios.”

Contact me at deepak.joshi@sap.comto see a demo or learn more about how SAP IBP for sales and operations can solve Mill products industry specific scenarios.

To learn more check out:Getting started: What is SAP Integrated Business Planning?

Integrated Business Planning Partner Sales Enablement Series

We had this NPI concern shared by some of our customers, so we wrapped our head around a solution. Feel free to comment and suggest improvement, your input is always appreciated!

Introduction

A common challenge in an integrated IBP/ERP environment is the new product introduction (NPI) process. The problem lies in the fact that the planning activities for a new product may occur long before it is even created in the core ERP system. Of course, if products are created simultaneously in ERP and IBP thanks to a proper Master Data Management process, what follows is not a concern.

In fact, creating and planning the new product in IBP only is not an issue. The question is: how can we ensure a smooth data reconciliation between IBP and ERP? Manual interventions are often chosen as a workaround solution, but it can quickly turn into a mess.

As far as we know, there is currently no standard functionality in IBP that covers NPI special requirements. This paper is intended to demonstrate how we can easily overcome, with IBP flexibility and Hana Cloud Integration (HCI) capabilities, two common issues related to NPI: the creation of a new product, and then the integration with ERP.

Preliminary notes:

1. We are not addressing the problematic of product substitution, neither Like Modeling, Interchangeability or Supersession.

2. The logic described below could be applied to any other master data type, i.e. for new customers planning.

3. For purpose of explanation, we will make reference to SAP ECC all through this paper, but it could have been replaced by any other ERP system or SAP application.

Standard IBP Model

In a typical IBP planning model, the master data object product relies on a unique key indicator, the product identifier. As proposed by SAP in their out-of-the-box models, this ID is generally sourced from ECC and is mapped against the material number.

This basic data structure becomes troublesome when we have to create the product in IBP prior to ECC. One basic solution would be to temporarily create a product with a dummy ID, but it would then be impossible to update this identifier since the product ID is a key entry in the database. Obviously, we could manage this manually by deleting the dummy product and recreating a valid entry once the material is created in ECC, but unless related key figures data get extracted and reimported with the new ID, planning data would be lost. And this is not to mention the data manipulation risks and the time needed for such an operation.

Solution Proposal

Trying to keep things as simple as possible, we designed a solution based on two configuration points: a minor master data modification in IBP and a conversion dataflow setup in HCI.

Data Modeling

Basically, what we suggest is to use the existing PRDID attribute as a native IBP product number and to add a new attribute for the ECC material number that we will call MATNR for example.

As in standard models, PRDID is defined as the key attribute, while the new MATNR is just a simple characteristic. MATNR is mandatory, but since it is not a key field, value can (and should) be updated as soon as the ECC material number is known.

Here is a simple view of what value should be maintained for each attribute, depending on the scenario that applies at the time the product gets created in IBP.

Scenario 1 is mostly relevant for initial mass upload in IBP during a project cutover, while scenarios 2 and 3 are part of a day-to-day product introduction process in IBP. 

More concretely, for IBP end users, the new product introduction involves the following:

1. The planner first creates the product in the IBP database with a dummy ID. This dummy ID is registered in both PRDID field and MATNR field.

2. Once the product is created in ECC, the planner updates the MATNR with the correct value.  (This activity must become part of the standard product creation process).

3. All Excel planning views and Web UI Analytics must be displayed at MATNR level since this is the more up to date data available.

ID Conversion via HCI

Now, considering that:

• Master Data and Key Figures are extracted from SAP applications with the material number as key indicator;
• Data must be imported in IBP tables based on PRDID key attribute;
• PRDID does not always match the ECC material number;
• IBP planning outputs are exported back to ECC.

We need to configure an ETL process in Hana Cloud Integration (HCI) that will support a two ways integration flow between ECC and IBP.

To import data in IBP, a transformation task is inserted in the HCI process flow in order to link the ECC material number to the corresponding PRDID key attribute.

Doing so, we have to generate an intermediate product IDs conversion table, built directly from IBP product master data and extracted via HCI. The conversion table is made out of two fields, PRDID and its corresponding MATNR.

To allow data transformation, the conversion table must be stored in the same HCI datastore than the data to be converted. It could be stored for example in a custom table developed in ECC, or either as a flat file on a server directory.

Once all data is repatriated in a common datastore, a simple HCI query can convert ECC material number to IBP product ID.

• Both SAP source data and the Conversion table are used as Input to the query.
• A joint between the tables reconciles the IBP PRDID with the data extracted from ECC.

From a more technical perspective, here is a view of the dataflow described above. Keep in mind that this is not an exhaustive table mapping, but rather arough example with INITIALINVENTORY key figure, just to illustrate in a simple manner how data are extracted from ECC, converted in HCI and loaded in IBP. In this example, the conversion table and ECC data are stored in a common repository. Note that HCI cannot extract data from ECC to a target files datastore. Thus, extraction must to be executed via a scheduled batch job in ECC or with another ETL tool.

Below is the result of such a dataflow, illustrated with a basic dataset.

Finally, to pull data from IBP back to ECC, the same conversion logic applies on reverse mode, i.e. IBP product number is converted to ECC material number. We shall just mention that it is judicious to exclude entries with dummy MATNR (flagged with a special range or prefix) from the query in order to avoid transfer inconsistencies (i.e. when a product ID exists in IBP but not in ECC).

Conclusion

The main benefit of this solution is to be low maintenance. The only manual action involved in all the process is to update the ECC material number in the IBP database once the information is available. Everything else is processed in the background and is totally transparent for end users. And last but not least, estimated efforts and time for implementing this solution are minimal, reflecting the simple configuration approach proposed by IBP.

Sales orders and outbound deliveries are key inputs for demand sensing (short-term forecasting) in SAP Integrated Business Planning. Four new template tasks are now available in SAP HANA Cloud Integration (HCI) to support the transfer of sales order and outbound delivery data from SAP ERP to IBP:

• IBP_MD_SalesOrder_InitialLoad
• IBP_MD_SalesOrder_DeltaLoad
• IBP_MD_Deliveries_InitialLoad
• IBP_MD_Deliveries_DeltaLoad

You can use these tasks as templates to create your own tasks for integrating sales order and outbound delivery data in your system.

You'll find information about creating your own task based on the template task in the note box of the task's data flow.

The extended version of the Integration Guide for SAP Integrated Business Planning 5.0, Using SAP HANA Cloud Integration is now also available at http://help.sap.com/ibp50 to support you in using the newly published template tasks.

Let me outline some important background information about the integration of sales order and outbound delivery data.

Modeling of Sales Orders and Outbound Deliveries

In SAP ERP, sales orders and outbound deliveries are considered transactional data.

However, in IBP you need a planning area that contains the sales order and the outbound delivery as master data types, such as the SAP6 sample planning area.

The REQQTY and CONFQTY attributes of the sales order master data type and the DELIVQTY attribute of the outbound delivery master data type are assigned as Attributes as Key Figures to the planning area.

DataSources in SAP ERP

The templates use the 2LIS11_VASL (for sales orders) and 2LIS_12_VCITM (for outbound deliveries) DataSources in SAP ERP. You have to activate these DataSources.

For the InitialLoad tasks, delete and rebuild the BW setup data.

For the DeltaLoad tasks, schedule a recurring job for extracting BW setup data. To get the most up-to-date data in your system with each delta load, schedule the DeltaLoad tasks in HCI to start after the BW data extraction job in SAP ERP has completed.

For more information, see the Integration Guide.

Delta Queue Handling

The InitialLoad tasks transfer the current status of all sales orders or outbound deliveries that have been created up to a certain point in time in SAP ERP.

The DeltaLoad tasks transfer the current status of all sales orders and outbound deliveries that have been created or changed since the last data transfer. For example, if a sales order has been changed several times since the last data transfer, only the current status is imported in IBP, the interim change records not. Sales orders and outbound deliveries that have been deleted in SAP ERP will stay in IBP, only the relevant key figure value is set to 0.

When you import your DataSource in SAP HCI, you define a subscriber ID. With that, you subscribe to a DataSource.

In SAP ERP, a delta queue - also called setup tables - of the DataSource keeps track of new/changed/deleted sales orders and outbound deliveries for each subscriber.

When HCI reads data from a  DataSource in SAP ERP, the subscriber ID is passed to the DataSource. With that, the delta queue determines which data has already been read by the given subscriber, and returns the unread data only.

Scheduling the Tasks in HCI

Before you run a task, make sure the necessary master data records (for customers, locations, and products) already exist in IBP.

If you haven't done so already, make an initial load of the master data records before you run the InitialLoad tasks.

Also, before you run the DeltaLoad tasks, synchronize the master data between SAP ERP and IBP to have the changes and the newly created records in IBP so that the transfer of sales orders or outbound deliveries can be executed.

Template tasks are available to support you in transferring the master data records to IBP. For more information, see the Integration Guide.

InitialLoad tasks: Probably, you will run these tasks only once. Would you need to run these tasks again, make sure you complete all the steps that are described in the Integration Guide for the specific task, including deleting and rebuilding BW setup data.

DeltaLoad tasks: We recommend that you schedule these tasks for a recurring run.

To have the most up-to-date data in your system with each delta load, schedule the DeltaLoad tasks in HCI to start after the BW data extraction job in SAP ERP has completed.

Technology advancements are driving evolution of IBP like what we experienced in the past as industry matured from MRP to ERP to Advanced Planning. Integrated Business Planning is continuation of the trend. Having said that, old technology won’t be able to support the required capabilities. As you will find below, it requires next generation technology platform like HANA to deliver these capabilities.

Integration from Strategy to Execution: IBP is expanding the scope of the integration within and beyond the enterprise. IBP integrates strategy and execution. Upstream it integrates strategy with the tactical planning by integrating finance plan, product portfolio planning, supply chain strategic plans etc. On the downstream side it connects tactical planning with response and execution to build the foundation for a real-time enterprise. Just moving to a faster and better planning systems alone, disconnected from monitoring and execution will constrain high tech organizations in dealing with the volatility in the market place.

Real-time: IBP enables companies to run business in real-time. It requires ability to monitor business performance in real-time, get insight with analytics and predictive analytics in real-time. Ability to run what-if analysis, simulations and compare scenarios to respond to the changes on the fly is critical. Mobility has added another dimension to real time. With Mobility world has not only moved to information availability anywhere but also anytime.

Internal and External Collaboration: Ability to collaborate easily has been a constraint in the adoption of the traditional S&OP. Main purpose of IBP is to support decisions-making process to balance conflicting objectives collaboratively internally and in the extended enterprise. Thus, it’s very critical to have consumer grade collaboration capabilities like Facebook to increase the adoption and effectiveness of IBP. With the increasing complexity of the suppliers and partner network batch-oriented point-to-point communication is not enough. Business network provides intelligent and real-time collaboration platform to orchestrate response and operations in the extended enterprise.

Predictive Analytics: Responsiveness to changes in the market conditions is the key to win in highly volatile market. It means making better decisions faster. It requires ability to analyze trends and predict the future in the short-term. Traditional forecasting models are not enough. High Tech companies need ability to predict and sense demand at a location, not one month in advance but next week or next day.

High Performance: IBP requires massive data crunching on-demand and in real-time. High performance computing platform is not the requirement but the driver of IBP.

Consumer Grade User Interface: Finally, it’s all comes down to the adoption of the technology. IBP has broad user-base from non-technical senior executives to planners to operations folks. Having intuitive and familiar user interface is prerequisite for all users – dashboards and drill-down analytics for senior executives, Excel for planners, Facebook like collaboration, alerts, notifications and mobile applications.

IBP is a highly configurable system and it is possible to configure it in a way that's not optimal for performance. This new Consulting Note describes some general guidelines to achieve good performance for a typical S&OP planning area in IBP both in terms of configuration and sizing.

2211255 - IBP for sales and operations: Planning Area Configuration & Performance Recommendations

Other Consulting Notes can be found here: Consulting Notes

Thanks

In the earlier blog SAP Jam Integration to S&OP on Cloud, the configuration steps to enable the integration of S&OP 3.0/IBP 4.0 collaboration to JAM have been described using the legacy permission framework provided with SAP SuccessFactors (SF).

In addition, there is another authorization framework provided by SF which is called the Role-Based Permissions (RBP) framework. You can read up the RBP details in this blog SuccessFactors: all you need to know about Authorizations and Security. For new customer who have subscribed to the SAP IBP on Demand, it is likely that the provisioned SF instance will be delivered with this RBP framework.

In this blog, we will describe the configuration steps that you can followed to setup the JAM using this authorization framework for the IBP collaboration.

One assumption is made here - you have already received the SF Company and Administrator User information from SAP.

Steps:

1. Logon your SF cloud instance using the provided SF Administrator User (i.e. SFADMIN).

2. On the SF administration top menu, select 'Admin Center' and the OneAdmin screen will be displayed. The OneAdmin screen is where the user, role and permission group objects will be maintained and assigned respectively.

3. Check that the JAM is provisioned with the SF Instance. Click the ‘Admin Center’ top menu and expand the drop-down list to confirm the existence of the ‘Jam’ entry. If you cannot locate this entry which indicates the SFADMIN user has no access into JAM yet, please create an incident reporting to the support team under the component ‘LOD-SF-JAM’.

4. Create the SF user for JAM collaboration. Under ‘Manage Employees’ screen section, click on the ‘Update User Information’ icon and select 'Manage Users' menu entry.

(a). On the Manage Users screen, there are various options (Add New User manually or the Export/Import Users) available to ease the creation of the user data information. You can use the 'Export Users' function to download existing user to understand how the data columns should be populated for uploading using Microsoft Excel file. The ‘Email’ field is the important one because this email address is used for the integration between the IBP and JAM system components.

5. Create a Permission Group to collate the SF user whom is required for the IBP collaboration. Under ‘Manage Employees’ screen section, click on the ‘Set User Permissions’ icon and select ‘Manage Permission Groups’ menu entry.

6. On the Manage Permission Groups screen, click on the ‘Create New’ button to add a new group.

(a). On the Permission Group screen, provide a name for the Group (e.g. JAM Access). Pick the 'Username' from the pull down category to search from the People Pool. You can also used other category to search for your required SF user.

(b). On the Search and Select Items screen, use the search function (i.e. binocular icon) to find the SF user.

(c). The final result should be a completed permission group assigned with the relevant user. The Active Group membership number indicated how many user are included in the group. The 'Granted Permission Roles' tab is still empty at this step because no role has been assigned yet.

7. Create a JAM role for SF user assignment. The role will allows SF user to have access into the JAM instance. Under ‘Manage Employees’ screen section, click on the ‘Set User Permissions’ icon and select ‘Manage Permission Roles’ menu entry.

(a). On the Permission Role List screen, click on the ‘Create New’ button to add a new role.

(b). On the Permission Role Detail screen, provide a role name (e.g. JAM Access) and description (e.g. JAM Access for IBP User). Next, you need to select the allowable permissions for the user. For simplicity as a guide here, it is alright to select all the checkboxes under the User Permissions section (outlined in red box below) for the non-administrative SF user. Please click on each link entry to view the checkboxes,

(c). To enable JAM access, that permission is included in the General User Permission section and you need to flag the checkbox ‘JAM Access’ mandatory.

(d). Finally, you need to grant the role to the permission group you have created from Step 6.

8. Also you can now verify that the permission group has been assigned correctly with the JAM role that was previously missing in Step 6(c).

By completing all the steps above, you are ready to enable the IBP collaboration by providing the email address of the SF user ID to the corresponding IBP application user ID. For IBP release 5.0 and higher, the email address is maintained in the SU01 user management - communication section.

Note: There is a scheduled SF system replication job for the JAM user. As such it is recommended that you check the IBP collaboration to the JAM on the next following day.