SAP IBP Upgrade Planning

This post is used for ongoing SAP customer communications related to major release upgrades of SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain.

For CI-DS Major Release upgrades, please see this link. (Please note that SAP IBP and CI-DS share the same Regular Maintenance Periods)

For the upgrade process and communication Information, please see this link.

SAP informs the harmonized upgrade schedule across solutions in note 2888562 (Harmonized release calendar for SAP Cloud products)

IBP hosted at SAP NS2 datacenter has a different release schedule than described below. NS2 IBP customers will be notified by SAP NS2 on the maintenance and release schedule.

Upcoming Planned Major Upgrades

• Weekend 1: All Test Tenants, Starter Edition, Partner Test and Demo, and PoC Tenants
• Weekend 2: All Production Tenants

Upcoming Planned Regular Maintenance

Note: HFC (Hot Fix Collection) = SPS (Support Package Stack)

HFC deployments run within local CMP (UTC) of the Data Center.

Future timings of upgrades are subject to change.

Maintenance and Service Level Agreement Document : LINK

Published SAP Integrated Business Planning Roadmap: LINK

Upgrade Communication and Planning Guidelines

• Upgrade notifications are sent to system administrator contacts.
• Emails are sent from: sapcloudsupport@alerts.ondemand.com
  Tip: make sure your email software doesn’t block this email address to avoid it going to your SPAM/Junk Mail email.
• Specific schedule of customer system updates will be communicated via email.
• SAP provides code fix support only for "n-1" versions. ie. when a new version (version "n") is "Released to Hosting," support is dropped for the "n-2" version.
• Upgrade notifications are only provided for major release upgrades.
• Hotfix Collections (HFC) and Emergency Patches (EP) are applied during the regular Contract Maintenance Period. Customer communications are not provided for HFC or EPs.

Upgrade NOTIFICATION for SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain

Notification Purpose

As part of SAP’s continued commitment to provide you with high value applications, we will be upgrading SAP IBP 2202 systems to SAP IBP 22205. For more information, please see:

• Available as of Dec 19, 2022: sneak preview for 2302 (preliminary What's New)
• Scheduled for January 2023: What’s New webinars for 2302
• Available February 3, 2023 (RTC):
  • What’s New in 2302 (final What's New) 
  • Release restrictions note 3238886

When

• Expect your systems to be unavailable during this period. This is consistent with the contracted maintenance windows.
• SAP will apply this upgrade (see the Upgrade Planned Maintenance section above).

Important Information

Activation of Planning Area

We recommend to activate your planning areas every 90 days or with every new release. This is needed to enable further features and to improve performance. To find out when your planning areas were last activated, go to the Planning Areas app, and search for the planning area you are interested in. You can find the date of the last activation in the Activated On column. For more information, see the Model Configuration Guide.

Activities after the upgrade

• System administrators should note that transports will only work between systems on identical SAP IBP release and Hotfix Collection (HFC). This means that transports are not possible in the period between Test (weekend 1) and Production tenant upgrade (weekend 3).
• After the Production tenant has been upgraded, it will be already on HFC 3 whereas the Test tenant will still be on HFC 2. The Test tenant will receive HFC 3 during the Contract Maintenance Period (CMP). As mentioned in the paragraph above, transports between tenants with different HFC patches won´t work. Therefore, customers should wait before releasing any transports from the Test to Production tenants until the CMP is over. Please also see the HFC deployment section above.
• For mandatory tasks that your administrators/configuration experts need to perform after the upgrade to 2302, please see the sneak preview or the What's New (links above). To find these tasks, filter the table for Mandatory task after upgrade. Filter for Must Know to identify disruptive changes that you need to have in mind if you want to set up new processes or create new objects after the upgrade. 

• The Planning Operators app that still uses UI5 technology (non-Fiori web applications) may require a clearing of the browser cache as described in SAP Note 2264167. This is particularly important after an upgrade because then the already downloaded and cached code on client (customer) side might no longer be in sync with the enhanced code on server side. It is not possible for SAP to clear the cache automatically after an upgrade. 

SAP IBP, add-in for Microsoft Excel 

The upgrade to SAP IBP 2302 does not require you to install the new version of the Excel add-in immediately. You can install it at a later time, for example, when you wish to use the new features that are available with the new add-in version. For more information about new features, see the sneak preview or the What's New (links above).

• Before users can install the SAP IBP, add-in for Microsoft Excel 2302.2.0, .NET 6 Desktop Runtime and Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime must be installed on their computers.

• We recommend using the newest Excel add-in version 2302.2.0 only after your SAP IBP system is upgraded to version 2302. ​Once your SAP IBP test system is upgraded, you may install the newest Excel add-in and run your upgrade tests. Please note that if an SAP IBP system is still on version "n-1", for example 2211, and the newest Excel add-in version "n", for example, 2302.2.0 is used to log into the system, it might happen that some functions do not work as before. For this reason, make sure that your SAP IBP productive system is upgraded before using the newest Excel add-in version productively.​

  You can download and install the latest Excel add-in version from the SAP Support Portal. The zip archive that you download contains the following .exe files that install the Excel add-in as a single ribbon:

  • IBP_Add-in_NET6_x64.exe for 64-bit Excel installations

  • IBP_Add-in_NET6_x86.exe for 32-bit Excel installations

• For a list of available Excel add-in versions and the features they contain, please see SAP Note 2394311. Please note that we plan to introduce a new upgrade policy with release 2311, see New Upgrade Policy for the SAP IBP, Add-In for Microsoft Excel.

• The minimum supported version of the Excel add-in is version 2005.2.0. Please note that we are planning to raise the minimum required Excel add-in version to 2111.2.0 with the upgrade to SAP IBP 2308, planned for August, 2023. 

• A comprehensive feature deep dive and end-user guide for the Excel add-in can be found on the SAP Help Portal. You can also open the guide directly from the Excel add-in, from the About group of the SAP IBP ribbon, by choosing Help -> Open SAP IBP End-User Guide.

• For more information on how to install the Excel add-in, see Installing the SAP Integrated Business Planning, Add-In for Microsoft Excel - SAP Help Portal and Self-Service Installation (Business Users) - SAP Help Portal. Note that you can use the upgrade option of the installer for changing to the higher version. You don't need to uninstall the version currently used. 
• For supported configurations and prerequisites regarding the installation of the Excel add-in, see SAP Note 2135948.
• For guidance on deploying the Excel add-in to end users, see SAP Note 2114654.

• For more information about restrictions related to the Excel add-in, please check the release restriction note for SAP IBP 2208 (SAP Note 3199715 available as of October 28, 2022). 

Questions? Who you should contact.

• For upgrade planning questions, please submit a customer incident using component: SCM-IBP-OPS-SRV. 
• Any exception request related to an upgrade must be submitted one week before the test tenant upgrade weekend. SAP will not be able to support requests after this date. 
• For application and technical support, please use standard SAP support (support.sap.com).
• For SAP Regression Test Service for SAP IBP, please contact SAP Services Team

SAP Cloud Integration for Data Services (CI-DS) - Release Information:

CI-DS Release schedule (server upgrades and agent release dates): SAP Note 2324184

SAP Cloud Integration (CI-DS) Maintenance Windows and Major Upgrade windows (Link):