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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Integrated Business Planning

Behavior Challenges when Implementing IBP

Behavior is a critical issue in the implementation of Integrated Business Planning (IBP) because the success of IBP relies heavily on people and their ability to work collaboratively and align their behaviors with the goals of the process. There are several reasons why behavior can be a challenge in IBP implementation. Firstly, IBP requires a significant shift in the way people work and think. It involves breaking down silos and encouraging cross-functional collaboration, which can be difficult in organizations where departments have historically worked independently. This requires a change in behavior at both an individual and organizational level, and this…
Debbie Evans
April 4, 2023
Business

“You can’t ship to last Tuesday” — Why Past-Due Orders Don’t Belong (and how they drive planners out of the system)

Time travel isn’t a supply strategy. Yet many ERPs carry past-due production, purchase, and transfer orders—ghost promises from yesterday. Keeping them doesn’t make you on time; it breaks your ERP, corrodes behavior, and pushes planners to run the business in spreadsheets. Here’s why those zombies need to go—and what to do instead. Why past-due is poison A past-due order is an open supply order with a due date earlier than today. Every day it remains late, your system pretends yesterday had infinite capacity and suppliers teleported parts. Cute fiction; ugly consequences. What it does to your ERP Lies to Sales…
Debbie Evans
October 6, 2025
Structure

A Reflection on Implementing IBP

My journey with IBP began on Halloween in 2013.  A day to remember as that was the day of the first MBR workshop with the leadership team and it was a day full of challenges, contention, and even hope.    Oliver Wight consultants did their best to keep this group together while being challenged from every imaginable angle but never faltering from the barrage of questions thrown at them like cannons in a war zone.  With much of the tension centered around trust, alignment, behaviors that would need to change for a fully functioning IBP process, and after much deliberation…
Debbie Evans
September 21, 2020
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