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
BusinessIntegrated Business PlanningOperations

The Importance of Capable People in the IBP Process

Integrated business planning facilitates a systemic cadence that enables leadership to make the appropriate business decisions to achieve their long-term ambitions.   This is accomplished by aligning plans, understanding assumptions, evaluating opportunities and vulnerabilities, and perpetually reviewing the different scenarios for optimization.  Too often during an IBP implementation, the process is focused on establishing the various reviews centered on the mechanics of the process rather than the intent.  The process itself will not yield the desired results for the business, it is dependent on the right capability of the people to be thoughtful about what is important for discussions.  Consider…
Debbie Evans
September 24, 2020
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
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