Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain (SAP APO)

EXPERT CONSULTATION

How APO Transforms Planning

Advanced Planning and Optimization

Edge SC offers a wide range of consulting services in the SAP Supply Chain Planning space with the necessary tools and expertise to help grow your business. We partner with our clients from start to finish, focusing on their needs while producing new ideas, developing effective strategies and designing high quality and scale able solutions.

Decades of implementation, project support experience in SAP's original planning tool; that helps organizations manage their supply chain.

SAP APO has four primary business applications;

DP (Demand Planning)
SNP (Supply Network Planning)
PPDS (Production Planning and Detail Scheduling)
GATP (Global Available to Promise)

Built on SAP BI technology and includes a Transport Planning application.

SAP APO KEY FUNCTIONS

SAP APO Key Functions to Transform Your Supply Chain Management

APO Business Intelligence (APO BI)

APO BI provides reporting and performance tracking for planning. It extracts planning data from APO into BI models to track forecast quality, service, inventory, and capacity across the network, enabling planners and managers to review trends, exceptions, and outcomes from S&OP and operational planning cycles.

Demand Planning (DP)

Demand Planning focuses on building a forward view of customer demand using historical sales, seasonality, promotions, lifecycle data, and manual inputs from sales and marketing. It supports statistical forecasting, causal factors, and consensus planning, then releases an agreed demand signal to supply planning so supply can be shaped to what the market is likely to ask for.

Supply Network Planning (SNP)

Supply Network Planning turns the demand plan into a feasible mid-term supply plan across the network of plants, distribution centres, suppliers, and transport lanes. It plans sourcing, production, distribution, safety stock, and capacity within constraints, using heuristics or optimisation to balance service, cost, and inventory across locations.

Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PP/DS)

PP/DS handles short-term, detailed planning on the shop floor. It sequences orders on finite resources, respects set-up times and constraints, checks material and capacity availability, and creates executable production schedules. The aim is to turn the tactical plan into a realistic, time phased production plan that operations can run.

Transport Planning / Vechicle Scheduling (TV/PS)

The supply chain control tower give you the ability to view your supply chain, analyse your KPI's and check the performance of your supply chain the exception handling through smart alerts and managing tasks, increased visibility of your supply chain via a single dashboard. Ability to drill down into issues increasing responsiveness making decisions in real time.

Global Available-to-Promise (GATP)

GATP provides real-time order promising across the network. It checks stock, planned supply, and capacity to confirm feasible delivery dates and quantities, supports rules for product substitution, backorders, and prioritisation, and can allocate scarce supply to high-priority demand. This protects customer commitments while keeping plans consistent with constraints.