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

Navigating Success: How Integrated Business Planning Can Propel New Businesses to Prosperity

Starting a new business venture can be an exhilarating yet daunting journey. Entrepreneurs often wear multiple hats, juggling countless responsibilities while striving to achieve sustainable growth. In this dynamic and competitive landscape, the concept of Integrated Business Planning (IBP) is often thought of as something for more mature businesses, but nothing can be further from the truth.  IBP is the valuable compass that can steer new businesses toward success by aligning all functions towards those strategic growth ambitions. Understanding Integrated Business Planning At its core, Integrated Business Planning (IBP) is a holistic approach to business management that aligns various organizational…
Debbie Evans
September 4, 2023
BusinessIntegrated Business Planning

Challenges of IBP

After 8 years implementing, coaching businesses and designing Integrated Business Planning (IBP) processes I have accumulated a long list of common challenges that often plague IBP deployments.   To understand all the challenges it is important to understand the intent and purpose of IBP. To contextualize how IBP should work in a business it is best to illustrate with an example.  Let say you want to grow your business from $500M to $1B in 3 years while maintaining a 15% EBITDA.   This is the focus to which the IBP process is centered for all the 5 steps, product portfolio review, commercial…
Debbie Evans
May 24, 2021
Capability

How do you know if your IBP Process is working

For many organizations reflecting upon their IBP performance, demand planning is considered as the primary indicator on determining a successful IBP process. A demand plan that achieves utopia by perfectly aligning demand with supply and when this does not occur it must be a demand planning issue and therefore IBP must be broken.  Conceptually we can all accept that there is no such thing as a perfect forecast, in practice however many organizations expect this elusive perfection and as an IBP practitioner, I am often besieged by supply chain leaders on the failures of supply chain performance as a result…
Debbie Evans
September 20, 2021
Operations

Order Control Gone Haywire: A Hilarious Guide to managing orders during a constrained supply situation

One of the challenges in the Integrated business planning (IBP) process is aligning the outcome of the monthly IBP process with the short-term tactical horizon.  It happens like this:  The demand review from the commercial team provides an unconstrained demand plan.  Supply Chain review responds with their known constraints that cannot be overcome, it is decided that the commercial team is then forced to constrain the demand plan and then supply chain is able to develop a supply plan that is both realistic and achievable.  The process works great! Right?  But not so fast, the customer, aware that there is…
Debbie Evans
July 12, 2023