IBP 1902: A Sneak Preview of Some Great Benefits
On the Go? No Excel? No Problem!
By Clay Thomas, Principal SCMO2
We just got some interesting news this morning while listening to the SAP call regarding changes coming in the IBP 1902 release (which will be available this Saturday, 9 February). The one we are most excited for is the ability to create plan views through a Fiori app in the web UI!
Most planners will still prefer to work with the Excel Add-In UI to perform everyday planning tasks, and (for now) that UI will retain greater flexibility and functionality for working with data. But there are a number of immediate benefits gained by enabling plan view and change access within the web UI.
One in particular is demand input. Your sales personnel, who are constantly on the road visiting customer accounts and checking on future product orders, can now make real-time changes to demand numbers through their mobile tablets, phones and other devices.
Another benefit? Imagine you are an early adopter using SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) to access a live report or view your dashboard in the web UI, and you see an alert caused by a near term spike in sales orders or other adjustment made by your team. As a Demand Manager with override authorization to consensus demand, you can now jump into your customized plan view in the web UI to react accordingly from wherever you are rather than waiting until you are in front of your PC to access that data in the Excel Add-In UI.
The usefulness of providing data change access through the web UI will continue to improve as SAP builds more capability here. But this is yet another example of how SAP is listening to requests from their customers and adapting their product accordingly. We live and work in an extremely dynamic and mobile environment and require tools that support this reality. SAP is keeping up in this latest release.
On a side note, I mentioned SAC in the example above to emphasize that a major value driver in using IBP within an SAP-first system landscape is lower TCO and ubiquitous integration. The IBP 1902 release adds more real-time integration APIs with SAC, and introduces a foray into enabling multi-ERP to single instance IBP via its Smart Data Integrator (SDI).
We’re excited about these new updates. And we bet you cannot help but like the direction SAP continues to push as well!
