Solutions Consulting

SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO)

APO in SCM 4.1 (and SCM 5.0) is a much improved planning system compared to the previous versions of the tool itself and versus its competition.  APO offers a variety of modeling options from basic time series models to multiple linear regression models.

• Constant Model or the First Order Exponential Smoothing Models
• Simple Moving Average Models
• Weighted Moving Average Models
• Second Order Exponential Smoothing with Trend
• Holt-Winters Models.

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

• exception alerts and
• user defined macro alerts.

It is important to leverage the full functionality of APO modeling and exception management.  If implemented correctly, you can take advantage of the many automated modeling strategies available in APO resulting in a more streamlined planning process and organization. 

To assess if you are getting the mileage out of your million-dollar SAP implementation, you ask the following questions:

1. Am I using a Pareto process in my forecasting activity?
2. Are there products and customers that are better left to APO's automated modeling strategy?
3. Am I using a segmented modeling approach?
4. How many customer/product segmentations are being reviewed by my demand planners each month?
5. Has APO helped improve our forecast accuracy?
6. How is APO helping us simplify and improve the promotional planning process?  Is it integrated into the CRM system?
7. Have I created the correct customer grouping for leveraging correlations across customer forecast errors?
8. Has the system simplified and improved forecast reporting process?
9. Are we using the system defined error metrics in APO?  Why are they different from the classic MAPE calculations defined in this website?

For more information contact or click here.