Countering COVID-19 Crisis with 90 days FREE SAP IBP license

By: Krypt Team - April 13th, 2020

Authored by: Akhilesh Pandey

With the raging spread of COVID-19 pandemic globally, both consumers & businesses are rapidly running out of essential resources. The unprecedented disruption of business is due to multiple impacts like –

Travel restrictions & travel ban
Exponential increase in demand & need for new supplies
Supply chain bottleneck & shipping restrictions
Challenges with excess inventory, shortages, storage and distribution

The impact of the pandemic has been alike for both consumers & businesses, being caught unaware. Devoid of key information, most businesses are vulnerable & incapable of meeting customers’ growing demand. Going forward, the cost of supplies may increase by expedited freight costs, paying premium price to buy up supply and stock capacity. As such businesses need to work through alternative sourcing strategies, identify alternative supply scenarios and evaluate how it will benefit them.

SAP’s Integrated Business Planning (IBP) solution can help businesses manage the COVID-19 disruptions and cost-effectively run their supply chain. Let us explore in detail how Krypt as an SAP preferred partner can help you rapidly deploy SAP IBP to mitigate these inevitable impacts for your business –

Travel Restrictions & Travel Bans

SAP IBP is a cloud software and it can be remotely configured and used. Plus with the 90 days license, free offer from SAP for IBP, customers can use IBP for their planning needs immediately without having to wait for a software implementation project.

Exponential Demand Increase & Need for New Suppliers

SAP IBP is a great tool for scenario modelling and planning. With relative ease and high performance, demand increase scenarios can be quickly modeled in IBP and run through the supply network to determine the impact on the entire supply chain right up to the level of suppliers. Also, in IBP, new suppliers and sourcing rules could be quickly added in the master data without any complicated integration or effort and the demand increase could be run with old supply network and new supply network and comparison between the two could be done visually through embedded analytics. Over and above this, Ariba’s Supplier Network is integrated with SAP IBP and if the company is on Ariba, very easy out-of-box connection between Ariba and IBP could be established and this will enable the company to include new suppliers in planning even quicker.

Supply Chain Bottleneck & Shipping restrictions

SAP IBP has very easy to set-up and flexible sourcing rules that could be modeled in different planning version. So, the company can run its baseline scenario with existing supply chain & network and new supply chain with new supply network due to restrictions in a different planning version. It can then promote the version specific supply chain to the baseline and carry out its planning activities. With this capability of IBP to create digital twin of an actual supply chain, the companies can effectively configure multiple supply chains and evaluate the best fit for their purpose and then promote that one as the baseline for planning and execution.

Challenges with excess inventory, shortages, storage and distribution

SAP IBP’s Inventory Optimization offers a very sophisticated and robust inventory optimization capability that enables increasing service level and reducing inventory at the same time. The optimization is multi-echelon which means that it recommends optimal safety stock at each supply chain node be it distribution center or warehouse. Together with SAP IBP supply optimizer, wherein storage and distribution constraints could be modeled and managed, SAP IBP helps in optimizing inventory across the supply chain network.

Flexible & efficient way to move goods domestically & globally

SAP IBP is a planning system that helps create digital twin of the physical supply chain. The company can flexibly define its digital supply chain in SAP IBP and employ it for physical supply chain planning by promoting it to the baseline version. This helps company in risk mitigation and impact analysis before making required changes to the physical supply chain.

Apart from the above offered options, an end-to-end visibility, AI/ML based data analytics and powerful visualization of metrics and KPIs are other key capabilities that Krypt through SAP IBP implementation/integration can empower organizations with.

As an SAP preferred partner we have helped global businesses across industries implement SAP IBP, SAP GTS, SAP TM, and SAP EWM to improve their bottom line.

If you are a business looking for a quick & comprehensive solution to minimize unforeseen risks, be sustainable and explore more about our products/services, please request a DEMO or do contact us.