Integrated Business Planning is a planning process that integrates across two or more functions in a business or government entity referred to as an enterprise to maximize financial value.
Contents
The specific functional areas in a company as well as the industry domain associated with the company defines the specific type of IBP process. Examples of IBP processes are:
The key requirement for IBP is that two or more functional process areas must be involved and maximizing (optimizing) of financial value should be done.
Corporate executives, business unit heads and planning managers use IBP to evaluate plans and activities based on the economic impact of each consideration.
Bridging Corporate Performance Management and S&OP There has been a lot of focus on Integrated Business Planning in the context of Sales and Operations Planning. Gartner (www.gartner.com) refers to a 5-stage S&OP Maturity model wherein IBP is referred to as the Phased 4 & 5.
Integrated Business Planning however is more broader than S&OP. It is an approach that that combine enterprise performance management (EPM) and sales and operations planning (S&OP) to provide incremental capabilities that neither provides individually. In so doing, IBP platforms address long-standing challenges that financial and operational professionals have struggled to overcome. The result: opportunities for step change improvements to how manufacturers plan, manage and govern their business.
Components
Integrated Business Planning requires the following capabilities to be enabled::
a) Enterprise Model
b) Integrated Planning
c) Enterprise Optimization
Applications
IBP has been used to model and integrate the planning efforts in a number of applications, including:
All of the above can be summarized as Enterprise Optimization use cases.
Criticism
Some argue that IBP is not any different from S&OP. See article by Patrick Bower where he calls IBP a marketing hoax, a name developed to create confusion and sell consulting and system services. The main proponents of IBP are in fact consulting companies. In return to this criticism, it has been pointed out that IBP is not a marketing hoax, but an important part of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) system.
Another criticism is that IBP is not academically defined and is supply chain biased in its definition. The lack of academic standard leaves room for interpretation to what IBP is, which is confusing practitioners. In a 2015 S&OP survey, 32% of participants answered that there is no difference between S&OP and IBP, 20% "did not know", and 71% of participants answered that there is a need for more industry standards around S&OP.
It has been called out that IBP has a lack of governance and in need of an industry group to create a unified definition. Due this lack of academic and industry standards, there has been an attempt to create an open source definition for IBP. This definition is as follows:
Integrated Business Planning (IBP): A holistic planning philosophy, where all organizational functions participate in providing executives periodically with valid, reliable information, in order to decide how to align the enterprise around executing the plans to achieve budget, strategic intent and the envisioned future.