We see the need to have a broader discussion regarding the forecasting practice in Semiconductor industry of baking supply constraints into the demand forecast. While this serves the revenue forecasting needs, it obscures the true demand signal and can lead to self-perpetuating chip shortages in future. Semiconductor companies have been extremely supply constrained for the last 2 years. This has put further strain on the IBP best practice of forecasting unconstrained demand and applying supply constraints to it later during supply review step to produce the constrained supply response. As semi ..read more

This blog post focuses on Touchless Forecasting: an enabler of demand forecasting optimization to produce the most optimal and granular forecasts by SKU/Location by month autonomously. This removes the process inefficiency and human bias challenges with most demand planning processes today. Touchless Forecasting approach with SAP IBP in a nutshell: Develop the best forecast within SAP IBP across Traditional Forecasting (Exponential Smoothing, ARIMA, Croston, etc.) and Machine Learning approaches (Gradient Boosting of Decision Trees). Ingest forecasts from external Machine Learning / Deep L ..read more

Hello all, this blog is focused on how to plan configurable products in SAP IBP. This is an enhancement delivered by GitaCloud team to augment S/4 Add-On for SAP IBP interface to support both Time Series Planning TS) and Order Based Planning OBP in SAP IBP. Read content below to understand the business requirement, SAP IBP functionality gap, solution approach, and business value, when it comes to planning configurable products in SAP IBP. Introduction: Make To Order MTO industries often deploy Variant Configuration within SAP S/4HANA to support sales order specific product configurations ..read more

Hello all, this blog post is focused on how to plan Phantom Assemblies in SAP IBP. Introduction: If you have Phantom Assemblies in your Bills of Materials in SAP ECC or in SAP S/4HANA, and you have tried Supply Planning in SAP IBP, then you may already know that SAP IBP does not currently support Phantom Assemblies. Phantom Assemblies are natively supported in SAP ERP MRP. This creates a hard gap for Customers looking to use SAP IBP Order Based Supply Planning to replace their SAP ERP based MRP solutions. GitaCloud team has delivered Phantom Assemblies Planning enhancement, which enables ..read more

Hello all, Sales Teams or Demand Planners are often not able to look beyond the top N high ASP / high Volume SKUs and also the demand planning cycles end up being focused on mostly just the upcoming quarter. Machine Learning offers the promise of accurate forecasts at scale and across the full forecast horizon, but cannot see round the corners as well as humans can in these non-linear and turbulent times. This presents an ML adoption conundrum, when it comes to autonomous forecasting. Hybrid approaches that blend human and machine intelligence in a pick-the-best-athlete mindset SKU by SKU quar ..read more

Integrated Business Planning is a hard act. It is marketed as a planning solution that enables planning use cases across time horizons and across stakeholder groups in a single planning model. Easier said than done, right? In reality, planning procurement, manufacturing, and transportation in a single model is hard, really hard. Sure, we can model a rough cut planning process across all the activities, but devil remains firmly entrenched in the details. As S&OP becomes more and more irrelevant in this turbulent world, the need to model operational details across all functions in a single p ..read more

GitaCloud has been in the forefront of Order Based Planning with SAP IBP, while most of the implementations were still for the Rough Cut Planning S&OP use case. It was an extremely rewarding, but challenging journey to meet customer requirements for Operational Supply Planning (S&OE) use case given how tightly defined and inflexible the Order Based Planning Model in SAP IBW was. On the one hand, it gave us speed of setting up SDI based integration of full master data and transaction data sets from SAP ECC or SAP S/4HANA. On the other hand, the tightly defined planning model with SAP7 P ..read more