Conference Agenda

SAP is the leading supplier of Supply Chain Management Software worldwide and offers a broad range of public & private cloud and on-premise solutions for supply chain planning, logistics, manufacturing, product life cycle management, enterprise asset management as well as solutions for more sustainable supply chains. For more than 25 years, optimization algorithms have been an integral part of the SAP Supply Chain solution portfolio.

Applying optimization algorithms to real-world, large-scale supply chains leads to significant challenges from both functional and performance perspective. To rise to this challenge, SAP is using a range of different optimization algorithms depending on the complexity of the underlying problem class, often in combination with (meta-)heuristics for improved scalability and performance.

We give an overview of the algorithms applied to different solution areas as well as examples highlighting the challenges in terms of scope, data volume and scalability of real-world planning problems of SAP customers. Application areas covered include supply chain network planning in SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) for Response and Supply, multi-echelon inventory optimization in SAP IBP for Inventory, production planning optimization and detailed scheduling optimization in SAP S/4HANA embedded PP/DS, vehicle scheduling and routing optimization as well as carrier selection optimization in SAP Transportation Management (TM).

To conclude, we provide an outlook on planned future innovations and give insights into current research focus areas. Key topics include the move from batch-oriented to online optimization, the application of quantum computing to real-world optimization problems and the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).