All Posts By

Debbie Evans

Business

Finance and Integrated Business Planning

The real value of integrated business planning (IBP) is the ability to establish credible plans that enable the business leadership to make the appropriate tactical and strategic decisions that aligns with the business’s ambitions over the long-term horizon.   To accomplish this, the IBP process requires transparency of bottom-up plans with credible assumptions that can be financialized that leadership trusts.   Unfortunately, integrating finance into the IBP process can be challenging for an array of reasons that often result in financial leaders becoming frustrated.  This frustration is recognized when you hear comments such as, “the business doesn’t know how to plan”, or…
Debbie Evans
June 1, 2021
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
man reading newspaper while sitting near table with smartphone and cupBusinessPlanning

Planning for uncertainty, responding with agility

“We have implemented Integrated Business Planning (IBP) but our performance doesn’t seem to be improving, why is it not working?”   This is a common frustration for many organizations that have embarked on the journey of IBP to obtain this miraculous alignment between supply and demand only to be left with minimal performance improvement.  In the early days of an IBP implementation the focus is hyperinflated on the business’s ability to demand plan within reasonable level of accuracy and eliminating bias, however determining the reasonable level of accuracy can often be subjective.   A supply chain manager that expects 98% accuracy in…
Debbie Evans
May 5, 2021
Integrated Business Planning

What Covid-19 taught us about IBP

Implementation of an Integrated business planning (IBP) process in a large matrix organization is far from short on challenges and even after several years these challenges often persists.  Navigating the dynamics of an organization that has deep seated roots lacking transparency, subterfuge, turf guarding and even egocentric behaviors can plague an IBP process often longer than the organization has the patience to endure.   How is it possible to integrate different functions in such an environment where supply chain poor performance is often the result of perceived bad forecast, a sales and marketing team that continues to miss sales targets due…
Debbie Evans
March 24, 2021
S&OPIntegrated 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
Integrated Business Planning

IBP – Where Decisions Are Made

In the movie Field of Dreams, the character played by Kevin Costner repeatedly heard the words, “if you build it, he will come”, implying that if he built a baseball diamond in his cornfield the famous Shoeless Joe Jackson would return to play ball once again.   If only this worked when implementing IBP, if you build it value will come.  Unfortunately building an IBP process doesn’t necessarily mean value from the process will miraculously just appear like Shoeless Joe Jackson and we are left with a mechanized IBP process but dissatisfied with the results. When designing an IBP process…
Debbie Evans
October 23, 2020
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
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 ImplementationStructure

A Reflection on Implementing IBP

My journey with IBP began on Halloween in 2013.  A day to remember as that was the day of the first MBR workshop with the leadership team and it was a day full of challenges, contention, and even hope.    Oliver Wight consultants did their best to keep this group together while being challenged from every imaginable angle but never faltering from the barrage of questions thrown at them like cannons in a war zone.  With much of the tension centered around trust, alignment, behaviors that would need to change for a fully functioning IBP process, and after much deliberation…
Debbie Evans
September 21, 2020