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Dear Reader,
In a year in which grocery store visits have been kept to once every other week, planning has been key.
Gone are the days of stopping by the store on my way to work to grab both something for lunch and a few key staples that weve depleted. Gone are the days of checking out that new store on the corner to see what interesting new items they stock. Instead, Ive been engaging in small-scale supply chain planning.
What do I have in inventory? (Pastaso much pasta!) What are my fast-moving goods? (Apples, eggs, cheese.) What has a long lead time? (Zaatar spice mix, which is not stocked by my local store, and so must be special ordered.) What have I been miscalculating weekly demand for? (Overestimating? Bananas. Underestimating? Seltzer.) Its a constant balancing act with many variables.
While planning for your business is (lets say) ten or two hundred times more complex than planning what goes into my fridge, a lot of the same types of variables are involved. Between these pages, our expert author team will walk you through them, showing you exactly how SAP IBP can handle all your supply chain planning needs.
What did you think about the third edition of SAP Integrated Business Planning: Functionality and Implementation ? Your comments and suggestions are the most useful tools to help us make our books the best they can be. Please feel free to contact me and share any praise or criticism you may have.
Thank you for purchasing a book from SAP PRESS!
Meagan White
Editor, SAP PRESS
www.sap-press.com
Rheinwerk Publishing Boston, MA
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Foreword from Martin Barkman
Supply chain planning is transforming from a functionally siloed, manually intensive, and operations-focused process to a more pivotal business planning function. Modern supply chain planning enables companies to be better equipped to capitalize on the needs of distinct customer segments, to anticipate and predict profitable ways of fulfilling demand, to drive lower costs through automation, and to guide decision making through comprehensive end-to-end visibility.
To enable this digital transformation, companies are recognizing the importance of having a connected digital business planning platform that can perform the following functions:
Capture new demand and supply signals from across the supply chain network while integrated with core ERP systems and processes
Facilitate better, faster, andwhen appropriateautomated (sometime referred to as touchless) decisions to be made through innovations in areas such as machine learning and pattern recognition
Continue to improve KPIs related to revenue, margins, working capital, and customer service while also opening up new opportunities for differentiated business models.
SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP) is a cloud solution that is anchoring digital transformations at both large global enterprises and mid-sized companies across industries and geographies. It should be a key part of any modern supply chain, and will allow your business to achieve your demand and supply-related goals.
At SAP we are very grateful for the collaboration between the authors. Their tireless efforts across many weekends and late nights resulted in the successful first, second, and third editions of this book.
Martin Barkman
Senior Vice President, Global Head of Solution Management, Digital Supply Chain, SAP
Foreword from Tim Gaus
We're living in an extremely exciting time! Digital disruption has created an entirely new dynamic for supply chains which fundamentally changes how we think about supply chain planning. The explosion of available data and our ability to draw insights at a granular level is opens up large opportunities for companies to transform supply chains into competitive weapons, enabling them to be more efficient, agile, and responsive.
As consumers, we expect seamless integration between the digital and physical. We should be able to obtain anything we want at the click of a button, and have it delivered to us within hoursall while tracking its progress in real time. These new expectations have profound implications on the broader business world. Speed, agility, and responsiveness are now basic, table-stakes requirements for a winning supply chain. The boundary between planning and execution is growing blurrier.
All of these pressures compel us to think about supply chain planning in a fundamentally different manner. A well-managed and collaborative approach to SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP) can be critical to successfully managing this transition.