It’s been decided, the benefits are too great to be ignored, the business case is indisputable, the business is going to implement integrated business planning. Three months later the design workshops have been completed, key roles have been defined and appointments made.
Notions of advancements in demand planning, inventory reduction, service level improvements now await, it’s only months away! The enterprise now looks to the integrated business planning leader in excited anticipation of fulfilling the promises which lead the business here.
So, it begins! There’s a belief the decision to implement integrated business planning (IBP) itself brings the implied rewards however the truth is very different. I concede the incentives to align, integrate, and converge an enterprise are unquestionable however the obstacles to the path to righteousness are often profound. Success, I suggest, is predicated on what is perhaps the holy trinity of business management; accountability, capability, and visibility, however, IBP brings increased clarity, focus, and ownership.
Operationalizing IBP is not for the faint of heart. More often than not, the IBP Leader is accountable for de-tangling existing processes, contending with sub-optimized operational capabilities, challenging legacy structures, and perceived accountabilities while attempting to gather meaningful data and insights to drive the process. Furthermore, from day one, there is a relentless search for ‘value realization’.
Images of a mythical, super-human character come to mind, a silhouette projected onto a backdrop with the company logo. Set within this environment what is the path to success? How do you start this journey, what are the milestones which define the small victories and demonstrate progress? The answer is not as formulaic as perhaps it is taught. There is no instruction manual, no deterministic path, no sequence of steps.
It is, in fact, a voyage of discovery, where every junction presents new challenges, necessitating continual course corrections and modification to the deployment plan. Who in their right mind would embark on such a challenge? How can the daily grind of questioning the status-quo, quizzing data, prying into the insular world of siloed thinking be gratifying? Here lies the eccentricity, there is no other business process which, when fully implemented, more effectively unites a business to a single ambition, pushes capability advancement, and brings clarity of purpose.
I submit, having mastery of the operations of such a process, in-spite-of the significant challenges, offers the same incentive as the age of enlightenment to the industrial revolution.
Having now been involved in three deployments and, although proclaim to still be practicing IBP, I offer some of my own learnings to advance the profession. In today’s environment, there needs to be a radical new approach to building and operationalizing integrated business planning.
The alignment between integrated business planning and capability architecture across all functions needs to be more tangible and deliberate. The duplicity of ‘wanting the benefits of a process which is not wanted’ means there is not a ‘one-size fits all’ integrated business planning process but it needs to flex and morph based upon appetite and environment.
