Business software vendor SAP has added an offering to its growing suite of quickly deployable applications aimed at helping businesses manage specific tasks across diverse industries.

SAP xApp Sales and Operations Planning (SAP xSOP), to be available in March, will enable finance, sales, purchasing, and production departments to collect, analyze, and track all sales and operations-planning data in a central location, thus cutting the time office staff spends compiling and preparing information for directors to make decisions, SAP said Wednesday.

The application, the newest member in the SAP xApp family of composite applications, will help companies deal with a common challenge in their sales operations: obtaining a consolidated view of all the sales planning-related data that flows through spreadsheets and applications used by numerous departments, according to Andrew White, research vice president at Gartner.

SAP's composite applications, which run on the company's NetWeaver integration middleware, tap reusable functions, or "services," from existing IT systems, automating processes that improve collaboration among business units and business partners, according to SAP

With SAP xSOP, each user sees the same sales and operations planning data at the level of detail they need via role-based dashboards, according to SAP. For instance, a detergent maker's sales and marketing directors can use their dashboards to determine the regional campaigns and in-store promotions needed to achieve a monthly million-unit projection. Production managers can use the same projection to determine how much detergent will be powdered, how much will be liquid, and how many tablets to plan for.

Integrated key performance indicators will be available in general categories such as demand, supply, inventory, capacity and budget. The indicators can be easily added and altered.