End Of SAP APO – What Now?
The lifecycle of SAP APO is expected to end in five years. What alternatives and possibilities are out there for users? Alan Duncan, Senior Industry Strategy Director and Gabriel Werner, Vice President EMEA Solutions Advisory at Blue Yonder discuss.
The expected end of life of SAP APO in 2025 means that users need to act, and they need to act fast. To continue to ensure high-performance supply chain processes, companies must decide on a suitable successor solution soon. Users can turn to its successor, SAP IBP, to plan their supply chains. However, there are other alternatives as well.
What are the differences? And to what extent can companies benefit by choosing a non-SAP planning tool? The SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO) supply chain planning system is used throughout every industry around the world. Maintenance and support for the solution are expected to be discontinued in 2025. Users will need to look for an alternative by then at the latest. The cloud-based successor solution SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) does of course come into consideration here, but the new product only works in conjunction with S/4 Hana. This means that APO’s end of life will involve a major migration effort.
It is worth looking beyond the horizon: What alternatives to IBP can be considered as a successor to APO? Blue Yonder’s Luminate technology, for example, comes into consideration here. Blue Yonder's solutions have long been recognized on the market as an alternative to APO due to their end-to-end planning, integration of supply chain planning and execution, modelling functions, and control towers.
The AI functionalities that are now available offer additional value. The machine learning capabilities built into it enable fine-grained forecasts, automate processes along the supply chain, and optimize demand planning. The solutions can furthermore be scaled to fit large enterprise applications.
Typical SCM tasks such as strategic and detailed planning as well as transport and warehouse management can then be handled by Luminate. In addition, the integrated control tower ensures optimal transparency across the entire supply chain. Nevertheless, if SAP users do not want to go without IBP, a hybrid environment is also possible. In this case, customers can use basic functions from IBP and flexibly add features from Luminate on a software-as-a-service basis.
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