Sales and Operations Planning (SOP) 

Purpose

This InfoArea includes BI Content for Sales and Operations Planning (SOP). SOP supports a process in which various enterprise areas can reconcile and synchronize their plans, such as demand, sales, and procurement plans. The aim of this process is to create a company-wide demand and procurement plan that corresponds to the strategic aims of the company. The company can thereby become more efficient.

Features

SOP enables an analysis and a comparison of the various plans and a simple simulation of alternative plans. SOP supports the following activities, for example:

·         Meeting management (including task management and action item management)

·         Document management (such as Power Point slides, Excel lists, and so on)

·         Analytics

·         Simulation

The SOP user especially needs aggregated data, for example at product family level. The SOP data basis offers the relevant BI Content (SAP NetWeaver 7.0 BI Content Add-on 3). It contains data that was generated in previous planning runs, for example by the SAP SCM application components Supply Network Planning or Demand Planning, and saved as time series data.

The following figure shows the SOP data flow model:

The data is loaded from a flat file into the InfoSource SOP Planning Data (0SOP_PLANNING) and from there into the InfoCube SOP Planning Data (0SOP_C01). It is then available for the four queries. For later planning purposes in a future release, a MultiProvider has already been provided.