SAP IBP is one the latest offering from SAP related to Supply Chain Panning. IBP Stands for Integrated Business Planning. Its an advancement to SAP APO Tool (Advance Planning and Optimization). With SAP IBP SAP has moved from standard SAP GUI To an Excel Based GUI. Most of the planners are accustomed to planning in excel and now IBP itself in Excel means strong acceptability from planners as they can keep their current Macros and other custom logic in excel as it is and it will sync with SAP IBP with very little effort. Below is screen print of the IBP Excel interface.

Excel is for planners / end users; from consultants prospective SAP IBP offers a web based UI for configuration and advanced setting as shown above. Its has a tile layout where various option based on modules are dived in square boxes. Various functionality of SAP APO are inherited in IBP from APO from modules like Demand Planning and Supply Network Planning.

Demand planning and Supply Network Planning in IBP has the same architecture as it had in SAP APO. The architecture comprise of MPOS, Planning Area and Key-figures. In terms of Demand Forecasting IBP inherits all functionality of SAP APO Demand planning and has additional advanced forecasting, analytics and graphical representation capabilities. In terms of SNP IBP of SNP heuristics and SNP Optimizer. CTM engine of APO is listed under a separate section called as IBP response.

For Demand planning and supply network planning perspective IBP uses CPI-DS for connecting to system like ECC for data extraction or processing. SAP Cloud Platform Integration and Data service is like SAP BI. it offers data processing functionality like SAP BI. For order based planning under IBP response separate interface is used to extract the data. With CPI DS and HANA capabilities the speed of processing IBP is exceptionally enhanced. PPDS capabilities are not their in SAP IBP and are merged with S/4 HANA ECC capabilities.