A SAP BW Integrated Planning Tutorial
If you are in business, you are in the planning business. If you’re a SAP user, you have a problem, you have a multitude of planning tools available to you, including:
- Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP)
- Business Planning and Simulation (BPS)
- Production Planning (PP)
- Controlling (COPA)
- Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC)
- Supply Chain Management (which feeds back into some of the previous planning applications) (SCM)
- Customer Relationship Management-Numerous planning possibilities here (CRM)
- Business Intelligence Integrated Planning, known as BI-IP.
Learn How to Create Planning Function in SAP BW
This last planning tool, SAP BI-IP (Business Intelligence - Integrated Planning), is the one I want to address today. This tool is located (from a technical stand-point), within the BW application and can be accessed using transaction RSPLAN.
The fact that the SAP BI IP application is located within the BW application sometimes leads to confusion about who should be doing what. The SAP BW consultant is typically helping you develop KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). However, one of the other functions of the BW application is as a repository of the "budget versus actuals" data for many of the planning functions mentioned before.
As a SAP BW consultant, you will need to be able to advise the business on planning functions. However, planning is normally a process carried out by various levels of the organization, and you will typically find that the finance side of the business leads the process or is, at a minimum, extremely interested in the process.
So how is Business Planning divided up?
Three different levels:
- Strategic Planning
- Operational Planning
- Execution Planning
Strategic Planning
Strategic planning is concerned with determining the direction of an enterprise’s future development; for example, the range of products and services, return on investment expectations, company growth plans and long term vision. Scenario based planning is very much in demand for this type of planning, allowing you to try different scenarios to see which one gets you to the goal with the least risk.
Operational Planning
Operational planning means allocating resources, (labor, capital, assets) necessary to meet the targets, and reconciling the resources across operational units (the sales volume has to be reconciled with the planned production volume, for example – if you have production capacity to produce 200 bottles of a a product a month but you can sell 1000 bottles in August (sunscreen), you must produce at least 800 bottles of the product in the months prior to August.
Execution Planning
Execution Planning is then carried out from the results of the Operational Planning.
Industry Clock Speed Drives Your Planning Cycle
In today’s fast paced economic environment, planning is done on a rolling basis, sometimes as often as monthly, but more typically 4 rolling quarters. The planning time periods are driven by the industry clock speed, meaning how quickly the product lineup changes. Some industries, like Personal Computers, change very rapidly, and thus have a very high clock speed while other industries, such as the airline industry, have much longer product cycles and a slower clock speed.
BI-IP thus, plays a central role in planning, and touches all three levels of the planning hierarchy. Over the next few weeks, we will be providing some basic training on the Integrated Planning application, starting with this weeks introduction to the creation of planning functions.
Learn the Basics of Creating Planning Functions using SAP Business Warehouse Integrated Planning.
We will also address the problem we started this blog off with, namely, how to select which planning tool for which role. In the meantime, to get started on understanding BI-IP, just click the button below.
- Developing Balanced Scorecards
- Discover How To Model SAP BI Integration Planning Scenarios
- SAP BW Project Estimator Tool
- How To Build a SAP SEM BPS Retail Industry Value Case
- Justify Your Project Value With Our Business Case Builder Tool
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