Integrated Business Planning

With Integrated Business Planning (IBP), you can steer and improve your company’s decision-making process and make better decisions that are driven by profitability – and ultimately, executing the strategy set out by management.

What is Integrated Business Planning

Integrated Business Planning (IBP) is a decision-making process that you can use to steer and align your company’s decision-making processes by:

• Making timely decisions that are driven by company profitability rather than silo targets
• Basing decisions on clearly mapped fact-based scenarios rather than gut feelings
• Establishing a single data model across functions rather than sets of fragmented data

By doing the above, you can create a common language across your organisation and support your company’s strategy.

With Integrated Business Planning, you can:

• Enhance the decision-making process by speaking the same language and by having a single set of numbers in a single data model.
• Link operations, sales and finance processes together to drive decisions towards profit maximisation and to support the company strategy.
• Agree on a clear set of roles and responsibilities across functions to ensure alignment across tasks.

Integrated Business Planning is all about getting people together

To us, Integrated Business Planning and S&OP are not necessarily different. However, we see IBP as a natural extension of the S&OP process, where financial planning is highly integrated into the Sales and Operations Planning process.

As for many other business processes, one size does not fit all. So, in order to get started, we propose the following three steps:

• Analysing where you are now
• Considering how far you can go
• Considering how far you want to go