You can use the planning application "Sales and profit planning" as a template when you want to execute your planning process on the basis of actual data, and want to solve the following planning tasks:

• Changing the quantity to be sold
• Changing the average values calculated from the actual data, and the percentages with the aim of influencing the planned result

Sales and profit planning enables the planning of sales and the revenue resulting from this on different aggregation levels. In addition, taking account of the cost of sales, the resulting contribution margins can be determined. Finally – together with the overhead costs – the planned operating profit can also be determined.

The initial position for this example is that the actual values from the current year should be used as a template for planning in the following years. The default values gained from copying the actual data, can be adjusted to the expectations by a revaluation in the market segments for individual key figures (for example reduction of overhead costs in a distribution channel by 5%).

Since the sales and profit planning takes place in different stages (strategic planning by top management, improvement by middle management, operational planning by individual key account managers), and the planned results should be comparable with each other at the different stages, the plan data is stored in different versions. Plan data is copied between these versions, and distributed from a higher aggregation level to a lower (top-down distribution) or inversely (bottom-up).

The valuation of planned sales (quantities) typically takes place on the basis of prices from the current year, which can be adjusted correspondingly to the expectations for the planning period. The adjustment should be carried out by the people responsible, this means the product costs should be planned by the purchasing manager, and the sales prices by the sales manager. In addition to values per unit of measure (for example price/unit), percentages of absolute values (for example sales discounts, and returns as a percentage of revenue) are also measures, which are used for planning.

This way, the adjustments of quantities, and prices, or percentages are the measures, which control the overall result in profit planning in SEM-BPS. The prices are stored in the corresponding aggregation level, production prices in dependency on the product group, sales discounts and returns in dependency on the product group and customer group. The comparison of planning on the different hierarchy levels discloses whether a further iteration of the planning process is necessary.