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

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
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
Integrated Business Planning

S&OP vs IBP. What’s the difference?

It is often a common practice for businesses to think about Sales and Operations planning (S&OP) and Integrated Business planning (IBP) as terms that can be reflected interchangeably, however there are very distinct differences that are important to understand and are more than just nuances.    These differences can have important implications on how an organization approaches deployment with respect to ownership, accountability and how data is constructed for visibility and decision making.   Let’s compare these differences:   Characteristic S&OP IBP Purpose Balancing demand and supply to align appropriate capacity and resources Understand the consequence of integrated plans with respect to…
Debbie Evans
March 17, 2021
Business

Navigating the Acronyms: Understanding the Differences between S&OP, SIOP, and IBP

In the world of supply chain management, acronyms abound. Three of the most frequently used, and often confused, are S&OP, SIOP, and IBP. While they all share common objectives in optimizing business processes, they are distinct in their approaches and scopes. In this article, we will delve into the differences between S&OP (Sales and Operations Planning), SIOP (Sales, Inventory, Operations Planning), and IBP (Integrated Business Planning), shedding light on their unique characteristics and how they contribute to the success of an organization.  If you asked 10 people to describe the differences, you likely will get 10 different answers.  Here are…
Debbie Evans
September 24, 2023