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

Why Executive Leadership Wins With Integrated Business Plannin

Every executive I know is drowning in data — dashboards, forecasts, KPIs, scenario models — yet still feels like they are flying blind when it matters most. This isn’t a data problem. It’s a decision problem. Integrated Business Planning (IBP) exists for one reason: to give executive leadership a single, trusted version of the business so they can make the right decisions at the right time, before problems become expensive. IBP quietly becomes one of the most powerful leadership tools in a company because it replaces reaction with foresight. Instead of managing by exception — waiting for something to break…
Debbie Evans
January 29, 2026
Managment

Leadership Accountability

Supply chain leader and a market leader are sitting at a bar, looking somber and frustrated. Supply Chain Leader: "We need to figure out how to explain our nonperformance to leadership. Any ideas?" Market Leader: "Yeah, we need to come up with something convincing." The supply chain leader starts brainstorming, looking stressed. Supply Chain Leader: "Maybe we can say there were delays in the supply chain due to unforeseen circumstances?" Market Leader: "No, that won't work. We've already used that one before." The market leader takes a sip of their drink, looking pensive. Market Leader: "What about blaming it on…
Debbie Evans
April 9, 2023
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