Success story

Increased competitiveness
with SAP IBP

Agrana

Service

Grow

Industry

Lebensmittelindustrie

Location

Tulln (AUT)

Agrana is an Austrian industrial enterprise that refines raw agricultural products. The core business of the company is sugar. Due to elimination of the EU sugar market quotas in 2017, Agrana had to increase the precision of its demand planning for all markets and segments. It also had to optimize its production, storage and distribution within the global supply chain network. To meet these goals, Agrana decided to introduce the planning tool SAP IBP.

Goals

The existing sales and replenishment planning tool was to be redefined and improved with the help of an integrative planning system in order to optimize the entire supply chain.

Guaranteeing the company’s competitiveness through better planning precision and optimized supply chain management
Implementation of an integrative planning system

Implementation

SAP Specifics

Cloud-based planning system SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP)
In-memory computing technologies based on SAP S/4HANA
Excellent user experience features, such as real-time dashboards, Microsoft Excel-enabled planning tables, interactive simulation functions, Fiori apps and embedded social collaboration tools

Key Benefits

Increased forecasting precision for the various markets and segments
Rapid and substantiated information about production, storage, purchasing and distribution of the goods with a view of the entire supply chain network.
Minimizing of the logistics costs under optimal utilization of the available production and storage capacities
Implementation of a standardized, company-wide S&OP process
Integrative and high-performance planning system that generates the optimized supply plan in just 10 minutes
Extensive options for simulation of “what if”-scenarios

Results

Optimized sales and replenishment planning thanks to SAP IBP

After positive results in the prototype phase, the business blueprint was created within two months as a detailed map of the implementation steps. Finally, it was time for the project to go live. In the subsequent hypercare phase, the quality of the master data required for the optimization was improved still further. With the help of the new SAP IBP tool, Agrana has been able to improve forecasting precision while minimizing logistics costs.

Improved master data maintenance

In the course of the SAP IBP implementation, it was necessary to collect all sales data, available capacities and – in particular – the costs on which the existing cost model is based. All costs were entered as master data for the new system, and this required accurate data entry. As this entails a considerable workload, a clever system for master data maintenance logic was developed that links costs to specific classification features. All other IBP planning levels can then be populated automatically with the help of the middleware CPI-DS. This considerably reduced the management workload, making it easier to maintain and modify the IBP master data.

The project was successfully completed within the defined parameters.

“With the implementation of SAP IBP, we not only increased the forecasting precision; we also minimized the logistics costs while optimizing capacity utilization.”
Thomas Kitzweger, Director Supply Chain Management Division Sugar

Increased competitivenesswith SAP IBP