With this year coming to an end, we are already looking forward to the exciting changes that will arrive with the 2602 release of SAP IBP. To save you some time during the busy holiday season, here are McCoy’s top picks from the new features of the SAP IBP 2602 release which will reach production tenants in the weekend of the 14th of February. Happy holidays!

AI

• AI-assisted MRO Inventory Analysis will be available in 2602, which allows you to generate insights to help you identify and interpret the main drivers of MRO inventory calculations.

• Planning Assistance is now generally available, this assistant will help you generate formatting rules for SAP IBP formulas in you planning views.

Integration

• With the 2602 release data transfers through SAP Cloud Integration can be scheduled. Integration flows can be triggered through SAP Cloud Integration from IBP. New application job templates are available.

Order-Based Planning

• With the introduction of harmonized scenarios with order-based planning, real time data will be reflected into scenarios that are created in SAP IBP

• When you integrate contracts from SAP ECC or SAP S/4HANA, transportation lanes for storage location MRP areas are now created automatically in SAP IBP.

• Where previously transportation lanes of type Stock Transfer (7) would result in an error when the source location product of a transportation lane wasn’t available in IBP, the system will now integrate the lane and only provide a warning, enabling to determine the missing source location product in follow-up steps.

• You can now use the new Deployment Conversion Run application job template to convert stock transfer requisitions planned in a supply or deployment run to deployment requisitions.

Harmonized Planning

• Shelf Life Planning and Characteristics-Based Planning are now supported for planning areas based on I_SAPIBP2.

• The supply chain network app has received some upgrades for use in combination with I_SAPIBP2 (Harmonized Planning Area) to automatically determine customer-related data used to render customer nodes and can now display procurement related data which visualizes the entry point of supply from unspecified vendors in your supply chain network.

Cross Applications

• With 2602 Applications can be started from the Fiori launchpad with /n and /o following the transaction code, the transaction code can be found in the ‘About’ dialog of an app.

• Launchpad spaces can now be downloaded and uploaded across systems.

• Where scheduled master data rules previously potentially could conflict with automated master data rules, master data rules are now enhanced to ensure the execution of the rule is delayed for 5 minutes if the table is locked. This will happen three times before the job terminates in an error to allow for more insight in conflicting rules.