SAP Analytics Cloud(SAC) is a Saas based Analytics solution hosted on top of SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) which offers Business Intelligence, Planning as well as Augmented Analytics.

To know more about SAC, please refer here: https://www.sap.com/products/technology-platform/cloud-analytics.html

SAP Integrated Business Planning(IBP) is SAP’s Supply Chain planning solution which allows it’s users to perform processes like Demand Planning, Demand Forecasting, Supply Planning and Sales & Operations planning and so on in a simplified and seamless way through a single solution.

IBP’s Business users can get the embedded SAC feature through 2211 release without having to do any admin steps from their and also without any extra cost on the customer for this feature as there is no extra license need to be bought by the customer. The embedded SAC into the IBP application would not only provide a best-in-class seamless analytical experience for the end-user, but also contextual analytics for the IBP users without having to connect to a different application or to move their data out of their database. At any give point in time, the data seen by a user on the SAC dashboard in this case is always ‘real-time’ or live data.

Architecture for Embedded SAC into IBP: 

The below Architecture digram describes the tight integration between the SAC and IBP applications.

All the IBP tenants that are upgraded after 2211 will be automatically embedded with an SAC tenant and it is always one to one mapping between the IBP and SAC tenants. The end-to-end workflow which includes the tenant provisioning and data connectivity between the apps and so on are automated via APIs which are delivered to the embedding application (IBP in this case) and thus the whole scenario is managed by IBP.

A new connectivity has been delivered for this integration which is called Integrated Business Planning connection or ABAP_MDS connection.

The SAC connects to IBP’s ABAP stack via this connection and the inA provider for this connection is HANA MDS. At run time, this connection behaves exactly like the normal SAC HANA Live connection that is available for the enterprise SAC customers today.

Using this connection, the IBP users can connect to IBP’s database and the create the live dashboards and stories on top of IBP’s data as self-service analytics.

Advantages of the SAC stories embedded into IBP: 

• Improve decisions with Powerful and stunning analysis and reporting capabilities
• Provide quick answers to business questions with Flexible and user-driven designs
• You can perform the Real-time analysis of planning results and business outcomes.

You can find more details around the embedded SAC into IBP as part of the below video: 

Video credits: Harman Kenton

Use-cases for embedding SAC into SAP IBP: 

Use cases for IBP ‘s embedded Analytics support visualization and analysis of all aspects of the supply chain planning process.  This includes everything from Sales and Operations Planning and executive review, to short-term Demand Sensing with daily forecasts for tomorrow.

Risk Review as part of the Sales &Operations process:

Demand Plan Analysis: 

Supply Plan Analysis:

Inventory Plan Analysis:

Carbon Footprint Impact:

Conclusion: This is only a starting point with the first release as part of 2211. There will be many more exciting features that can be expected by the IBP users in the upcoming releases.

Stay tuned!