SAPinsider Vegas 2023 Session: Extending SAP IBP Capabilities with AI

⇨ When it comes to off-the-shelf solutions, SAP IBP still offers some of the most advanced features available among all off-the-shelf integrated planning solutions.

⇨ As technology evolves exponentially, customers are envisioning enhanced capabilities from their supply chain planning setup.

⇨ With open-source tools available to build advanced capabilities leveraging AI and ML on top of SAP IBP, customers are looking for new and innovative ways to either streamline their existing processes or develop new planning processes.

SAP pioneered building an enterprise’s integrated view and innovated the first enterprise systems, allowing organizations to break the system silos between internal functions. While the initial avatars of the SAP ERP were complex, the advantages of having an enterprise-wide system were many for organizations. One was the capability to build visibility into enterprise-wide processes and capture enterprise-wide data. A whole ecosystem of companies evolved in the SAP technology landscape to help organizations use this data best. Eventually, SAP recognized the importance of this market and launched products that allowed customers to further use the captured data from their SAP ERP systems. SAP IBP was one such product that became SAP’s flagship product for supply chain planning.

SAP IBP still offers some of the most advanced features among all off-the-shelf integrated planning solutions. But as technology evolves exponentially, customers envision enhanced capabilities from their supply chain planning setup. With open-source tools available to build advanced capabilities leveraging AI and ML on top of SAP IBP, customers are looking for new and innovative ways to either streamline their existing processes or develop new planning processes. The session “NVIDIA Leveraged AI and SAP IBP to Transform Forecasting” on day 2 of SAPinsider Vegas 2023 was focused on the use case that discussed how NVIDIA leveraged AI to build advanced planning capabilities on top of SAP IBP.

NVIDIA already had a robust AI platform that it offered as a product to its customers. NVIDIA partnered with CloudPath, a supply chain digital transformation company, to build an AI-enabled solution that integrated with SAP IBP and helps improve external factors forecasting for the company. The solution leveraged NVIDIA’s AI platform, SAP IBP, and third-party solutions like the Gurobi solver.

The solution has two components combining two types of analytics approaches — predictive and prescriptive. The prescriptive analytics component of the solution develops the initial forecast. Since this component leverages deep learning, the solution can handle large amounts of data. The solution taps into data available in SAP and other data sources to generate an unconstrained initial forecast. The forecast then acts as an input to the second component of the solution, which is a prescriptive mixed integer programming algorithm. This is not just a great example of building solutions that combines multiple analytics approaches but also illustrates how SAP technology users can enhance the capabilities of SAP IBP by leveraging advanced algorithms in tandem.