Integrated Business Planning

Let’s Rethink How We Manage Business

 

IBP is provocative, challenging, and, at times, contentious, yet the benefits are unquestionable. We have experience navigating the dynamics which impede IBP implementation in a variety of different businesses. This experience affords us the opportunity to help others take the concepts of IBP and provide pragmatic operational solutions, avoiding rabbit-holes, minefields, and some of the frustration associated with the deployment.  This site is created to provide online support, answer questions, and help others on their IBP implementation journey.

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BusinessPlanning

Why do machine learning algorithms need training data set before predictions?

Training data is a crucial component in the development of machine learning and data science algorithms. It serves as the foundation upon which models are built, and allows the algorithms to learn patterns, relationships, and rules that they can then use to make predictions or classify new data. In more technical terms, training data is used to train a machine learning model, which is essentially a mathematical function that maps input data to output data. During training, the algorithm iteratively adjusts the parameters of the model based on the input data and the desired output, so that it can make…
Sriram Parameswaran
April 26, 2023
Business

Finance and Integrated Business Planning

The real value of integrated business planning (IBP) is the ability to establish credible plans that enable the business leadership to make the appropriate tactical and strategic decisions that aligns with the business’s ambitions over the long-term horizon.   To accomplish this, the IBP process requires transparency of bottom-up plans with credible assumptions that can be financialized that leadership trusts.   Unfortunately, integrating finance into the IBP process can be challenging for an array of reasons that often result in financial leaders becoming frustrated.  This frustration is recognized when you hear comments such as, “the business doesn’t know how to plan”, or…
Debbie Evans
June 1, 2021
Integrated Business Planning

What Covid-19 taught us about IBP

Implementation of an Integrated business planning (IBP) process in a large matrix organization is far from short on challenges and even after several years these challenges often persists.  Navigating the dynamics of an organization that has deep seated roots lacking transparency, subterfuge, turf guarding and even egocentric behaviors can plague an IBP process often longer than the organization has the patience to endure.   How is it possible to integrate different functions in such an environment where supply chain poor performance is often the result of perceived bad forecast, a sales and marketing team that continues to miss sales targets due…
Debbie Evans
March 24, 2021
OperationsStructure

The S&OP Merry-Go-Round

“Demand and supply are happening at the same time, don’t separate them integrate them”. The notion that ‘demand’ occurs and ‘supply’ responds is a fallacy, in fact, the two are symbiotic whereby one is as dependent upon the other as much as the other on the one. These two entities have a mutually beneficial relationship that should, must, be leveraged however there’s one significant issue; they speak different languages. When I say ‘different languages’ I don’t mean variants of the Germanic language, I mean one speaks Klingon and the other Dothraki. Although by no means an expert linguist I can’t…
Kim Britton
October 6, 2020