Demand Planning Capabilities in Duet for Microsoft Office and SAP

Have you heard of Duet?  Duet is a software solution from Microsoft and SAP that allows users to work with SAP business processes inside of Microsoft Office.  Duet is sold and supported by both SAP and Microsoft.  Most chemical customers that deal with either SAP or Microsoft all the time know of Duet, but I'm not sure how much is known about all the different capabilities inside of Duet.  When I was at LogiChem, there wasn't a lot of awareness of the Demand Planning capabilities delivered inside the current version of Duet.

The demand planning functionality allows you to create planning sheets using Microsoft Excel, as well as analyze and manage demand planning data from the mySAP Supply Chain Management application.

There are a few likely usage scenarios.  The main scenario is that you have a demand planner who wants their sales folks to add or change their forecast data into the demand plan.  The planner can simply create a demand planning worksheet customized for the sales territory and locked down so they can add/edit only the relevant fields.  They can then make this planning sheet available to the sales teams to enter their data (whether online or offline) and synchronize it back into SAP.  The planner can then take consolidate and approve all the entered forecasts for the business and save it back into SAP.

At the end of the day, a lot of demand planning is done in Excel, though the master data may be stored inside of SAP.  These capabilities allow users to work with the data seamlessly and naturally and shared it out to a broad group of user for updates.  Check out the site above for more details.

Brian Willson

Microsoft Chemical Team