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

Integrated Business Planning for New Start-up businesses

Integrated Business Planning (IBP) is a comprehensive planning process that aligns business strategy with operational plans and financial forecasts. It is an essential tool for any business looking to achieve its goals and objectives. While IBP is often associated with established businesses, it can also benefit new start-up businesses. In this article, we will explore the benefits of integrated business planning for a new start-up business. Provides a framework for growth: IBP provides a framework for growth by aligning business strategy with operational plans and financial forecasts. This helps start-ups to identify areas of growth and to create a plan…
Debbie Evans
May 1, 2023
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
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