Your organization’s supply chain is like a jigsaw puzzle. All parts of the puzzle fit together seamlessly. But when the box of puzzle pieces is knocked over, or a few pieces fall away, it is not easy to put everything back together. You strive to increase sales, reduce inventory, improve service levels and work more efficiently. And that hinges on proper planning.
For a long time, you hardly had to worry about the supply chain. Your regular supplier or subcontractor was stable, price levels were constant, you could rely on reliable delivery times to and from distant countries, and warehousing and distribution were rarely a problem. Those days are long gone. The number of puzzle pieces multiplied in a short time. Consider, for example, increased attention to sustainability issues, highly fluctuating prices, unpredictable delivery times, slow handling by logistics service providers and changing customer needs. Moreover, the pandemic and unrest in the world caused doors to certain sales or production areas to close at once.
Simplify the complexity of your organization’s supply chain
In short, the puzzle has become much more complex in a short period of time. Too complex to oversee by oneself. A problem somewhere in your supply chain has consequences beyond your own estimation. And the same goes the other way around: it’s hard to estimate what impact, positive or negative, it will have on your organization if you change something somewhere in the supply chain.
Het ‘nieuwe’ planningsplatform van SAP genaamd SAP IBP (Integrated Business Planning) helpt en maakt het mogelijk om deze doelstellingen te bereiken. It allows your organization to map all the variables of your supply chain and respond to them appropriately. In IBP, all the information from your supply chain comes together. Both from inside and outside your organization. All integrated into your ERP system. We list the main benefits:
- From silos to one whole
Many departments are involved in your supply chain. These are all interdependent, as a problem somewhere in your supply chain trickles down to different departments. Still, it often happens that information gets stuck somewhere, causing certain departments to be informed about it too late. With IBP, that will change. The transparency of the system ensures that the various departments no longer operate as separate silos, but together form a single entity.
- Always real-time insight
To make the right decisions, you must be able to rely on up-to-date data. What happened yesterday is already obsolete today. SAP Integrated Business Planning provides real-time insight into the status of your purchase orders, production planning, inventory levels, transportation and distribution, among others. This allows your organization to proactively identify problems and respond quickly to changes or disruptions.
- Looking to the future with AI
Look beyond today. Thanks to integrated artificial intelligence (AI), IBP offers your organization a glimpse into the future. It combines historical data, market trends and other relevant data. Advanced analytics techniques, such as machine learning and predictive modeling, turn this into accurate and reliable forecasts. This view of the future means that there are no surprises as an organization.
- Easily more sustainability
Sustainability is a top priority at almost all organizations. SAP Integrated Business Platform provides the insight you need to do business more sustainably. For example, by aggregating information about CO2 emissions, plastic use and other materials from your ERP system, analyzing it and planning optimally with it.
- Scenario planning and simulation
What are the consequences of renewing part of your puzzle? Do the pieces still fit then? And is the end result prettier, or is nothing more correct? Those kinds of questions are crucial in optimizing your supply chain. You can turn all sorts of knobs, but that’s only useful if you have all the consequences mapped out. With SAP Integrated Business Planning, you have the planning scenarios, models and “what if” analyses to identify the consequences of, for example, price changes and complications.
MidOcean, Remeha and Avebe enrich operational processes with SAP IBP
Accurate demand forecasting is essential for organizations in the manufacturing industry. Because the better the production numbers match demand, the lower the inventory costs and the higher the service level. What does this look like in practice? At our customers MidOcean, Remeha and Avebe, we implemented SAP Advanced Planning & Optimization (APO), the predecessor of IBP. The overarching challenge at these companies lay in being able to plan more accurately and meet changing customer demand more quickly. Thanks to Advanced Planning, sales data, inventory data and machine capacity are combined at all these companies into a realistic operational plan. This takes an integrated approach to operational planning, with optimal coordination between logistics, business office and customer service. The expertise we have built up with clients such as Fujifilm, among others, means that we are able to take Sales & Operations within companies to the next level like no other. We specialize in sustainable supply chain solutions; we do nothing else.
Find out more about SAP Integrated Business Planning
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