The application allows companies to plan based on demand priorities and adapt quickly when faced with demand-upside opportunities or supply disruptions. Based on the powerful SAP HANA platform, the new offering enables faster, more accurate decisions supported by what-if analysis, and easy analysis of constraints in the supply chain.

With this release, all of the major components of SAP Integrated Business Planning are now available. The cloud-based suite now supports the end-to-end planning processes of sales and operations planning, demand sensing and planning, supply and allocations planning, response planning and inventory optimization. These applications, along with embedded analytics, alerting and collaboration capabilities, enable SAP customers to achieve greater visibility, shorter planning cycles, and faster response to changes in demand and supply.

“SAP Integrated Business Planning for response and supply continues our innovative path toward a holistic, seamless, easy-to-use, planning suite,” said Hans Thalbauer, senior vice president, Extended Supply Chain, SAP. “Since its original release in 2012, the suite has grown dramatically in cross-industry customer adoption as well as in functional breadth. By taking advantage of our cloud-based planning innovations, our customers can experience improved service levels, significant reductions in working capital and enhanced planner productivity.”

SAP Integrated Business Planning 6.1 includes enhancements across all components, as well as an SAP rapid-deployment solution, a set of enablers and best practices to facilitate fast time-to-value deployments.

In addition to the release of SAP Integrated Business Planning 6.1, SAP has also introduced a promotional package offered to existing customers of the SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization component and the SAP Enterprise Inventory and Service-Level Optimization Analytics analytic application.