INITIAL SITUATION: A COMPLEX SALES NETWORK WITH MANUAL RESTRICTIONS

A leading beverage distribution company in the United States operates an extensive distribution network that transports products from production facilities to central warehouses and then to company-owned distribution centers, external logistics partners, and finally to large retailers such as Walmart, Amazon, and other direct customers.

The company faced a common supply chain challenge: its network planning was heavily reliant on spreadsheets, manual order uploads into SAP S/4HANA, and limited capabilities for optimizing truck capacity.

The challenges can be summarized as follows:

• Planners had to rely on Excel spreadsheets to calculate replenishment, and the results had to be copied manually into the execution system.
• Planning cycles were long—for example, planning for just 10 distribution centers could take more than six hours.
• Trucks were often dispatched only partially loaded, resulting in very low truck utilization.
• Planners had to review hundreds of orders per cycle, leaving them little time for value-adding tasks.

This meant that the supply chain was not only inefficient but also costly, with high storage costs and a heavy workload for planners.

GOALS: SMARTER, FASTER, AND MORE EFFICIENT SUPPLY CHAIN PLANNING

• Against this backdrop, the project’s objectives were clear:
• Ensure that products arrive at the right time, in the right place, and in the right quantities.
• Maximize transport efficiency by utilizing truck capacity as fully as possible.
• Reducing storage costs by consolidating product flows.
• Simplifying the daily work of planners by replacing manual, spreadsheet-based workflows with a modern, automated system.

SOLUTION: TRANSFORMING PLANNING WITH SAP IBP AND OPTIMIZING FULL TRUCK LOADS

To achieve these goals, concircle supported the beverage distribution company in implementing SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) – SAP’s cloud-based planning platform that combines demand, supply, inventory, and response planning in a single system. IBP combines advanced analytics, real-time simulations, and collaboration capabilities, enabling companies to align supply chain decisions across all business functions.

Two key IBP modules were used for this project:

• Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP): to balance supply and demand while ensuring target inventory levels across the entire network.
• Response & Supply (R&S): to convert replenishment requirements into executable orders and optimize them to full truckloads.

The new process involves two steps:

1. The perfect replenishment is calculated based on target inventory levels at each location.
2. Rounding logic is applied to shift additional product quantities to create efficient full truckloads (FTL). Only relevant product-location combinations are considered for this optimization to ensure precision without unnecessary complexity.

Planners no longer need to edit Excel spreadsheets or manually copy orders into the execution system. Instead, they now only need to review and confirm the proposed plan by setting a simple approval flag in IBP. Once approved, the system automatically creates all corresponding orders in SAP S/4HANA – both sales orders for external partners and purchase orders for internal locations. No manual data entry, no copying and pasting, no additional steps required.

ADVANTAGES: AUTOMATION, SPEED, AND EXCEPTION-BASED PLANNING ON A LARGE SCALE

With SAP IBP as its backbone, this leading beverage distributor in the US was able to transform its supply chain planning from a manual, spreadsheet-based process into a highly automated, optimized, and exception-driven model.

The result is not only measurable improvements—higher truck utilization, faster planning cycles, and lower inventory costs—but also a more sustainable way of working, where planners spend less time dealing with crisis situations and more time creating value.