Most of the demand planning cycle can now run without a planner touching it. That is the idea behind a new SAP Best Practices process in SAP IBP release 2611, which SAP made available at the end of October (SAP Community, 30 October 2026). In SAP’s words, it automates the demand planning process “while keeping the demand planner involved where it matters.”
For planning teams that spend their week producing a forecast instead of improving it, that is worth a closer look.
What the new process does
SAP describes the process, called IBP Advanced Demand – end-to-end demand planning automation, in four parts:
- Automatic segmentation. Products are grouped by more than the classic ABC/XYZ split. Life cycle status and forecasting indicators are taken into account too.
- The right model per product. Based on each product’s demand pattern, the process picks between best-fit forecasting, Croston TSB for intermittent demand and Extreme Gradient Boosting.
- Job chains run the cycle. The steps run in sequence on their own, and each product is evaluated again in every cycle.
- Alerts bring the planner in. Configurable alerts point local and global planners to the cases that need judgement. Planners can still adjust the plan with local market knowledge.
SAP delivers it as reusable content. Thresholds, segmentation profiles and forecasting models can all be adjusted to your business.
Croston TSB is worth a word. Many products sell irregularly: nothing for weeks, then a large order. Standard models forecast those badly, and planners end up overriding them by hand every month. A method built for intermittent demand, applied automatically to the right products, takes a lot of that manual work away. SAP has also published sample instructions for its Exception Management Agent with this release, so teams can see how an AI agent could help work through the alerts.
What else is in 2611 for planners
The same release adds scorecards that compare scenarios against weighted KPI targets, alerts that appear based on the planning step you are in, and a central cockpit for real-time integration errors between SAP IBP and the ERP system. For supply and transport planners, there is support for co- and by-products and an option to fill partly empty truckloads by pulling future demand forward.
Where the work really is
Switching on a best-practice process is the easy part. Three things decide whether it pays off:
- Clean history. Automatic model selection learns from past demand. Promotions, stock-outs and one-off orders that are not cleaned out will steer it the wrong way.
- Alert thresholds that fit your business. Set them too tight and planners drown in alerts again. Set them too loose and the exceptions that matter slip through.
- Clear ownership of the exceptions. Someone has to own each alert type and decide when the plan is overridden.
That last point is what made our Ask Lily project with Evergreen Garden Care work. Automating the routine gave each demand planner 6.5 days a month back, because the team knew which decisions stayed with people.
Keeping up with every release
SAP IBP gets a new release every quarter, and most teams don’t have time to go through each one. That is why our BEST support subscription for SAP IBP includes a quarterly update on the new features that are useful for your specific business, next to daily monitoring and regular user training. The demand planning automation in 2611 is exactly the kind of change we flag for clients: valuable, but only once the data and the alert rules are ready for it.
If you want to know what 2611 could do for your demand planning, or how your current IBP setup would handle it, talk to our planning team →