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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Business

Truth Beats Stretch: An S&OE Story

On Monday at 8:07 a.m., the war room smelled like dry-erase and coffee. Ravi, the supply planner, clicked his laptop shut with a little flourish. “Good news,” he said. “I bumped the plan eight percent. Bit of a stretch, but it’ll light a fire.” Maria, who ran the bottleneck filler line, raised an eyebrow. “We have one filler,” she said. “It runs at one filler speed.” “Totally,” Ravi said. “But if we aim higher, we’ll get more. People step up.” By noon the “stretch” had turned into schedule musical chairs. To hit Ravi’s number, the plan jammed in two extra…
Debbie Evans
October 8, 2025
Business

Why deploying Integrated Business Planning is so hard..

Conceptually, integrated business planning isn’t complicated to discern and as a result, many organizations readily take on this journey of enlightenment. This prospective planned utopia of enlightenment that provide a regular cadence for aligning plans between our product portfolio, commercial demand and supply chain that enables business leadership to orchestrate the necessary business decisions for the achievement of strategic growth over the long horizon.  How hard can it be, right?  Unfortunately, for those that have led an organization through such a journey, it is by far one of the most challenging roles to undertake and definitely not for the faint…
Debbie Evans
December 1, 2021
Integrated Business PlanningStructure

The Importance of Strategy for IBP

Integrated business planning designs a business structure that facilitates alignment across the organization with transparency to performance issues, that enables the business to focus on the critical decisions in order to achieve business long-term ambitions. Although many leaders in an organization are eager to realize the potential benefits that are derived from a fully operational IBP process, many are not cognizant of the significant change such an implementation will need to endure.  It is common that deployments of IBP began within the supply chain organization by enabling alignment between supply and demand, however, it quickly becomes exhausted by foundational capability…
Debbie Evans
September 21, 2020
CapabilityIntegrated Business Planning

Why is my Integrated Business Planning process not working?

Why is my Integrated Business Planning (IBP) process or Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) process not seem to work? I have encountered many frustrated IBP or S&OP leaders with a question on why they seem to have a good output from their monthly IBP or S&OP process, which includes an agreed plan that balances demand planning with supply chain. However, what is actually produced in the plant ends up being completely different. Delivery performance doesn’t seem to improve, commercial teams are frustrated that customer orders are not being fulfilled.  Supply chain leader continues to blame an inaccurate Demand plan, finance…
Debbie Evans
June 14, 2023