SAP To Offer Sales And Operations Planning App

SAP AG plans to launch in March a quickly deployable application that can gather and analyze sales and operations planning data, and deliver it to multiple departments within an organization.

The new software is the latest in SAP's portfolio of xApps, a collection of composite applications that perform specialized business tasks across diverse industries. The software runs on top of SAP NetWeaver, integration middleware used to draw data from SAP's own ERP systems and other data stores.

SAP xApp Sales and Operations Planning, or SAP xSOP, gathers data from throughout a company, and brings it together under one application that can be accessed by finance, sales, purchasing and production departments. The data is delivered through role-based dashboards. Key performance indicators in general categories, such as demand, supply, inventory, capacity and budget, can be built in to the dashboards.

SAP xSOP is built to address the problem of collecting planning-related data that can be scattered in spreadsheets and applications throughout an organization, the German software maker said this week. Bringing the information in a central location makes it easer to compile reports that can be passed along to managers.

The new software is scheduled to ship in March, and can be bought as a standalone product, or as an extension to SAP's enterprise resource planning system.