S&OP: A process to develop tactical plans that provide management the ability to strategically direct its businesses to achieve competitive advantage on a continuous basis by integrating customer-focused marketing plans for new and existing products with the management of the supply chain. The process brings together all the plans for the business (sales, marketing, development, manufacturing, sourcing, and financial) into one integrated set of plans.

-APICS Dictionary

Driver-based planning is an approach to planning and management that is focused on identifying an organization’s key business and value drivers and then creating business plans and budgets based on these key drivers.         

Driver based Planning is new feature introduced in IBP for Demand . Internal and External constraints as drivers which influences the change in the demand either as an Opportunity (Positive) or Risk (Negative) along with the other constraints of Demand planning. So far, the drivers are directly imported within the sales and marketing manager forecast, which do not have a clear understanding for any KPI Measures in future whereas in Driver based planning we have an information consistent on how particular driver influence whether it increase or decrease the total forecast.

Now the Sales Planner can directly be able to update the drivers from their mobile gadgets remotely even without logging into Excel Addin.

Process Flow: Driver Based Planning

Configuration setup

To achieve this a New APP ‘Driver Based Planning’ is used for this configuration. Drivers can be either Quantitative or Qualitative.

We can create multiple drivers which can be in the form of Risk or Opportunity for a business by defining it with a different set of Attributes, KFs and planning filters.

The key feature of the driver-based planning APP is that the value for drivers can be set directly in the Fiori Tile which would be automatically updated here in Excel Addin.

Driver(s) can be shared to a group. Driver values can be maintained in either Planning view or Web-UI. Similarly Planning filters can be maintained and changed here. Web-based value update will help sales representative can enter the value from his mobile phone remotely.

Attributes selection are unique between attributes and Planning level attributes.

Time periods are linked with Planning level attributes and Keyfigures.

MDT

Risk and opportunities

If we consider the Risk, Opportunity or both Included in Plan as ‘1’ then this will be considered in Demand Plan in KF – “Consensus Demand Risk and Opportunities”. Risk / Opportunity ID shown here are created in the Driver based Planning app. Prioritize the drives using priority id (low, medium, high) among the multiple drivers.

Excel Planning view

RO Agg Sales Quantity will adjust the Risk and Opportunity factors maintained in the app ‘Driver based Planning’ for the period from May’19-Jul’20.

Since both the events (risk and opportunity) are included in the Plan. Consensus demand Qty with Riskopp (5302) is adjusted the value of RO Agg Sale quantity (-133) with Consensus demand qty (5435).(Ex: Sep’19=5435-133=5302).

This way we can create multiple drivers of Opportunity and Risk for different periods. Driver values can be changed either in Excel Planing view or in web-UI app.

We can delete the drivers once it is invalid. Suppose multiple drivers are used for the same set of data, then the values will be adjusted cumulative across multiple drivers and we can see the break up by add Risk/opp id attribute in the planning view.

Restrictions

1.Only Stored editable key figures that are supported during disaggregation

2.When we create new driver, the toal key figure value is distributed equally across the time periods and individual planning objects

3.If a KF is selected that is not equally distributed, then the planning view cannot be saved

4.Only base version is supported for Driver Planning view

5.Drivers can be selected from single master data types

Useful link

https://help.sap.com/viewer/feae3cea3cc549aaa9d9de7d363a83e6/1908/en-US/f1336f0cec0440de892d505abbcf2506.html