Does SAP IBP Replace APO? - Brightwork Research & Analysis

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Executive Summary

SAP IBP is SAP’s replacement for APO…so does SAP IBP replace APO?
We provide our feedback on IBP.

Introduction

SAP IBP is SAP’s attempt to replace APO. For whatever reason, SAP decided that it needed a new solution — and this was supposedly an incremental solution, which began with S&OP. So why use IBP?

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem.
Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers.

Our Research Orientation

As one of the virtually only independent entities that cover SAP or SAP APO, and unlike Gartner or Forrester as one that takes no money from any vendor, we are in a unique position to address this topic with far higher accuracy than the traditional article on IBP which is either designed to sell IBP license or IBP consulting services. So we are in an excellent position to explain why to use SAP IBP.

The Idea Behind IBP

The concept behind SAP customers buying SAP IBP is to modernize supply chain planning that uses APO, or even companies that never purchased APO.

SAP proposes that IBP is an improvement in the following ways over APO.

It includes S&OP functionality, and SAP proposes more collaboration.
It uses Excel as its primary UI for planners.
It uses HANA, which SAP proposes to improve planning performance.
SAP uses the term “real-time” to describe IBP, which does not have much meaning, as planning is not a real-time function.

However, in our analysis of IBP, most of the improvement claims on IBP, or how IBP is differentiated from other planning applications, do not hold up.

Our Key Observations About IBP

Throughout the presentation by SAP of IBP, we are told how groundbreaking IBP is. However, this is never apparent from analyzing IBP. We think of the following things about IBP.

IBP appears to be a rather generic offering with little differentiates it from other far less expensive options.
IBP is not competitive in terms of being a supply chain planning application, nor as an S&OP application.
If it did not have SAP pushing it, it is doubtful that it would be a prominent application.
IBP is confused as to what it is. It seeks to be both an S&OP application and a supply chain planning application — and how it fits with modules like GATP and PPDS that have been moved into S/4HANA is not well explained by SAP. This is a significant disadvantage to IBP, as it means waiting for SAP to figure it out. IBP was introduced back in 2013 and is still being fleshed out and figuring out its messaging.

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Conclusion

IBP is just a generic planning solution in a pretty marketing wrapper. It has so far not found very much implementation success, and surveys by Lora Cecere have found generally low satisfaction with IBP.

Much of what IBP is offering is just usability through export to Excel. However, it is not necessary to move to IBP to get this functionality. For example, provide support for APO that allows us to add several boosters that improve APO and fix significant flaws in APO. That also enables APO to have data exported to Excel and then brought back in from Excel. This service is available at less than the cost of what SAP customers currently pay for SAP support on APO.