Solutions Consulting - Usability

SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO)

APO in SAP SCM  is a powerful demand planning and Sales Forecasting tool.  It has a variety of Statistical Models and demand planning features such as life cycle planning, Time series profiling, Outlier detection as well as Exception Management. 

Is your company leveraging the full functionality of APO modeling and exception management? 

We can help you develop consistent processes to leverage the modeling power of the SAP APO engine from basic time series models to multiple regression models.

• If your planning process with SAP needs to be re-engineered, we offer our Re-design and Re-configuration Services - help you fix challenges created by the original implementation and offer an optimized overall system for better performance with usability. 
• We offer the Model Tuning Consulting Service that will leverage the features with in the existing configuration and optimize the Statistical capabilities. 
• For smaller budgets, we offer the our customized in-house APO DP Training. The APO DP training offered by DemandPlanning.Net is a comprehensive hands-on workshop that will teach your planners both the theory as well as the modeling mechanics of the tool, with in your planning system.  Put to work your million dollar implementation!

We can help you re-energize your implementation to

1. Take advantage of the many automated modeling strategies
2. Better use causal modeling
3. set alert thresholds so modeling is done by exception
4. create a more streamlined planning process and organization

APO also offers the capability to forecast and manage the process by exception through

• Uni-variate forecast alerts and
• User defined macro alerts.

APO offers a variety of modeling options from basic time series models to multiple linear regression models.

• First Order Exponential Smoothing Models or Constant Models
• Moving Average Models
• Linear Regression Models and MLR Models
• Second Order Exponential Smoothing with Trend
• Holt-Winters Models

To assess if you are getting the mileage out of your SAP Demand Planning implementation, you ask the following questions:

1. Has APO helped improve our forecast accuracy?
2. Are there products and customers that are better left to APO's automated modeling strategies?
3. Am I using a segmented modeling approach?
4. How many customer/product segmentations are being reviewed by my demand planners each month?
5. Are the statistical models tuned?  How do we set the various model parameters to produce good forecasts?
6. Am I using an exception-oriented process in my forecasting activity?
7. How is APO helping us simplify and improve the promotional planning process? Is it integrated into the CRM system?
8. Have I created the correct customer grouping for leveraging correlations across customer forecast errors?
9. Has the system simplified and improved forecast reporting process?
10. Are we using the system defined error metrics in APO?
11. Why are they different from the classic weighted MAPE calculations defined on http://demandplanning.net?

Contact Us to schedule a complementary initial consultation to discuss how we can bring value to your SAP APO process.