How to Replace Best Fit in SAP DP?

Executive Summary

  • What is the Dirty Secret of SAP DP?
  • Why Replace Your Best Fit Functionality in DP?
  • Operationalizing the Brightwork Explorer Best Fit to SAP DP

Introduction

SAP DP is a popular forecasting application. However, it has a secret which we will cover in this article.

SAP DP’s Dirty Secret

Its best fit functionality runs into complications when running in production. SAP and SAP consultants that work for consulting companies hide this fact from customers, and this has been going on for decades and a combination of ignorance and lying on the part of SAP and SAP consulting firms continues to lead to the same outcomes for clients.

The upshot is that companies that use SAP DP typically have a broken best fit procedure. That is in effect. They do not have the best fit operational.

Our Approach

For years we have been replacing best fit in DP with better and lower maintenance approaches, which we have stripped from the website as they were being taken by SAP consulting firms. The problem is that all of the current applications require you to purchase a new application to create the best fit. It means that companies that have invested in DP have planners who are already comfortable using DP have to perform an entirely new implementation of another forecasting product. Then the users need to be retrained on the new application.

These issues limit the number of companies that can reasonably be expected to replace the best fit procedure in DP.

This is why we decided to add the best fit to Brightwork Explorer and to make it easy to use. Once the best fit is run in Brightwork Explorer, the results can be imported into DP.

However, we are working on providing the best fit functionality for free that can be used to permanently disable the problematic best fit that comes with SAP DP.

Operationalizing the Brightwork Explorer Best Fit to SAP DP

The trick is that companies run best fit using Brightwork Explorer for free. These companies can then perform the assignments between the product location combinations and the forecast methods in something called the Process Chain in DP.

We will offer services around this, and it is one of the best ways to use DP.

Conclusion

After many years of consulting in DP, we can say with high confidence that…

  1. SAP DP works best when customers don’t attempt to access any of its more complex functionality.
  2. The companies that do the worst with SAP try to enable its complex functionality, thinking that they will be the ones to “get it to work.”
  3. Best fit in SAP has significant design issues, particularly related to maintenance.
  4. The bottom line is that it consumes too many resources to get to work.

For over a decade, SAP made excuses for SAP DP, saying that its fault was users or that a new version of APO would solve the problem. APO is no longer being developed, so there is no further development that will occur with best in DP. SAP is telling companies to move to IBP.

Don’t overwhelm your IT department or the business with trying to troubleshoot and maintain DP best fit! DP best fit is well known problematic piece of functionality when there is such a straightforward way of improving it.

Notice

It has come to our attention that Guidehouse Consulting has been using our best fit material to try to figure out the best fit for the US Navy. Guidehouse Consulting has reached out to us to provide free consulting support. If you have a consulting firm that is struggling with best fit or auto model selection, you most likely should not have them as a consulting firm as most consulting firms have no idea how to get this functionality to work