The motto of this year’s SAP Academic Community Conference DACH in Magdeburg was ‘Enterprise Cloud’. IT experts and researchers in academic teaching as well as decision-makers from business, administration and politics were invited for a joint, supra-regional dialog and exchange of experience. Under the motto ‘Smart Supply Chain Models’, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Brigitte Bärnreuther had the opportunity to report on her experiences with the new supply chain software from SAP in the classroom.
Hof University of Applied Sciences is in close contact with OTH Amberg-Weiden on this topic. Logistics planning has been part of the curriculum at Weiden Business School for many years. The teaching concept in Weiden involves students designing a supply chain for a smart product and mapping it in the system using the predecessor software SAP APO (Advanced Planning and Optimization).
Focus on production planning
At Hof University of Applied Sciences, the modules on business application software tend to focus on operational production planning and control. It is therefore logical to combine these areas of expertise and to switch to SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP). IBP is a cloud-based planning system based on SAP HANA in-memory technology. Planning and evaluations can be performed using the web interface (SAP Fiori) or with the Excel plug-in.
Participation in pilot project
A first step towards cooperation/conversion was the participation in a pilot project of the SAP University Competence Center (UCC) Magdeburg for the use of IBP in teaching. The project involved 25 universities and colleges worldwide. The teaching materials provided by the UCC (presentation, exercises, case study) were tested and evaluated by the lecturers during the 2021 summer semester. Hof University was one of 5 organizations worldwide to which a productive system was provided. In the summer semester of 2022, students in the master’s degree program Operational Excellence and General Management worked practically with this system in the module “Business Management Systems”
The predominantly Indian students were extremely interested in the topic. The subsequent evaluation revealed, among other things, that they would have liked more case studies, that they welcomed the integrated dashboards without additional integration of third-party software and, above all, that they were able to work practically with an SCM system.
