A Fall Color Reflection on SAP IBP
By Clay Thomas, Principal SCMO2
Recently, I took a “fall foliage” driving tour with my family, mainly because my son and I collect national park quarters and have challenged ourselves to see as many national parks as possible before his 18th birthday. Our trek across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine resulted in numerous areas with little to no cell coverage, and bed and breakfasts with intermittent Wi-Fi. I got very little online work done in between small towns, maple syrup, lobsters and colorful drives and hikes.
Turns out that having limited connectivity helped me to step back and consider this whole question about SAP IBP from a higher perspective. Literally. From the tops of Mt. Cannon and Mt. Cadillac to be exact!
While we at SCMO2 have been developing content for our upcoming SAP IBP Bootcamp, we have been scouring the details to determining what aspects of the tool to demonstrate, offer workshops for and provide commentary on. Even more generally, we as a company have spent much of the past few years advising customers how and when to integrate aspects of this tool into their technical landscape to improve their planning processes.
In 2017, the introduction of Business Network Collaboration and continued facilitation of SAP Cloud Platform integration advance the narrative that SAP IBP truly can deliver a unifying planning platform. And it has enough breadth, depth and agility to demonstrably reduce cycle times and costs to serve, improve the accuracy of and speed reaction to an ever-changing market place for your company’s products.
We live in a world of trending instant gratification where we tend to emphasize, as a consumer, speed and convenience over quality or long-term prospective of the product. It is remarkable how much SAP has made progress in delivering stability, depth and greater breadth in the information you employ in your planning processes. While we still advise customers on progressively implementing different swaths of the tool based on returned business value, the reality is that SAP IBP will be the hub through which you can successfully compete. Using expansive quantitative, financial and collaborative information, and process management, these tools are perfectly suited to meet the rapid—even rabid—pace of today’s demand.
Sometimes it takes the changing colors of fall to really see the forest for the trees. And if you can get your fill of maple syrup at Polly’s Pancake Parlor while sitting atop a mountain and observing the beauty of the detail you have been driving through, it just makes it that much better!
