No debate, SAP has taken a great decision in 2013, while designing the new advanced planning solution in SAP family, so called SAP-IBP, by choosing Microsoft Excel to expose data to end-users.
Figure1 : IBP data presented in Excel
Compared to the former solution, APO (Advanced Planner and Optimization), with data being shown in cumbersome and intuitiveless SAP private screens, called Planning Book, IBP simplifies planner and end-users life by presenting data in Excel instead. To do so, user needs to install the IBP-Addin Excel.
In IBP Excel, using the Excel Addin, user then can interactively select data from IBP database (Hosted in SAP-Cloud), decide which of the business dimensions make sense (product, customer, hierarchy, site, region...), choose which keyfigure data (sales, forecast, projected stock etc...), and select which period granularity (day, week, month...).
Honestly SAP-IBP Excel interface is really much simpler than any other SAP solution, 5' instructions and user can already start using.
Ho, He, this is rubbish and dangerous !!!
I can ear already the Excel haters saying Excel is the hell of business applications, data are disseminated in different places. Users overcome company security with VBA coding. Each user can revisit their business rules and ignore core model rules... Bla Bla Bla. No doubt these haters are frustrated and do not known SAP-IBP.
No data are not disseminated, they get stored in the single place that is the SAP-IBP Hana based database. Should they need to have a copy in local file, why not!
Security is closely observed, SAP and Microsoft are not stupid and provide the necessary handles to company it to control and prevent security breaches even in Excel.
User are free to add further rules and local data, in addition to the company's ones. They can personalize their planning view (Excel Worksheets) with colors and graphs, to better animate their local teams. So what! Are they not so doing to improve their performances? Obviously yes!
For sure, compared to APO, IBP users do not need expensive consultant to adapt planning view, this has become personalization.
All this looks good however...
However whenever SAP includes Excel as a front end, this is always with its own interpretation of data management. As shown in bellow figure, SAP does not make use of the most interesting Excel feature like tables, slicers, pivot table.
Result is a graphically not so attractive, graphics are managed by local poor VBA coding. Color management uses a bizarre logic inherited of an other SAP component, EPM, so that it is difficult to easily manage colored displayed unless spending a lot of time.
Surely SAP will include further layout options and data mining features in future, but not now.
So ?
So there are solution to already enhanced further SAP IBP results in Excel by mean of XSBS capabilities, as well as expertise we developped specifically in IBP at DOWAP Solutions. As you can assess in the below IBP planning view, we developped for a customer, with our addon, you can introduce floating tools (here color and log popup), slicers (here 3 slicers related to displayed data), ribbon (see here the campaign ribbon being part of this IBP template), tables (all shown data are organized as Excel table alloing filter, slicers etc..), graphics (dynamically refreshed according to cursor position), functionnal helps, local alerts driven by user Excel formula, and with some coding even introduce further calculations, application logs, to supplement IBP when standard is limited.
In summary, not only SAP-IBP is a good and powerfull planning proposition, well designed, this is also opened to enhancement and we are happy helping customers to closely adapt their SAP solutions to their exact needs.
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