SAP IBP 2508 – What’s New in the August 2025 Release

The latest version of IBP introduces a range of powerful enhancements designed to further unify planning processes, enhance user experience, leverage AI capabilities, and support more flexible system integrations. In this blog post we will give you a short overview of the highlights for the 2508 release of SAP Integrated Business Planning.

Key Highlights of SAP IBP 2508

New Planning Area: I_SAPIBP2 

One of the standout features in this release is the introduction of a completely new sample planning area named I_SAPIBP2. This planning area represents a significant evolution of SAP’s IBP platform by providing a harmonized and unified planning environment combining time-series and order-based data.

• Scope and Capabilities:
  I_SAPIBP2 supports a broad range of planning horizons and scenarios, including:

• Mid- to long-term planning for supply, demand, and inventory using time-series data.

• Short- to mid-term order-based supply planning, which focuses on detailed, transactional planning closer to real-time operations.

• End-to-End Visibility and Flexibility:
  The planning area is designed to offer comprehensive end-to-end supply chain visibility, enabling planners to see the full picture from demand forecasts through supply execution. It also provides greater flexibility by allowing integration of both master data (such as product, location) and transactional data (such as orders and shipments) using various integration technologies including built-in Real Time Integration of order- and master data.

Order-Based Planning:

• Cross-system stock transfer scenarios is now available, enabling planning activities across multiple ERP systems simultaneously.

• A new Delivery OData API allows external applications and logistics platforms to query delivery data directly from IBP, enabling better synchronization between planning and execution systems, and improving operational responsiveness. 

Demand Planning:

• The demand planning experience has been enhanced with advanced forecast explainability featuresembedded in the UI. Planners can now better understand the statistical models and AI algorithms behind forecast outputs, building confidence and allowing more informed decision-making.

Planner Workspace and Excel Add-In:

• A new scenario comparison feature with scorecards in Planner Workspace lets planners evaluate multiple forecasting or planning scenarios side-by-side. Using predefined KPIs, planners can identify the best performing forecast to promote as the baseline plan, streamlining scenario analysis.

• A performance analysis tool now reports load times for different planning views in Planner Workspace based on their configuration, enabling planners and administrators to optimize system performance by identifying and adjusting resource-heavy views.

• The SAP IBP Excel add-in provides powerful capabilities to generate and apply formatting directly within Excel templates. This allows users to customize the appearance of planning data dynamically, such as setting fonts, colors, borders, and conditional formatting based on data values. By leveraging the add-in’s formatting features, planners can create more readable and visually intuitive reports, enhancing data interpretation and decision-making efficiency.

Keep an eye out for our YouTube videos and other updates on SAP Integrated Business Planning!