With a crystal-clear objective, motivated teams, an effective process and – of course – the right resources, organizations can achieve great things. Various pharma companies have developed, gained approval for and manufactured effective vaccines against COVID-19 with unprecedented speed and on a scale that was previously considered impossible. This is a terrific example of what can be done when everyone works towards the same goal.
Unfortunately, it’s much easier to find examples of the other extreme, such as sport teams full of star players who are more interested in their own glory, EU member states who can’t agree on a shared vision and therefore stand in the way of a stronger Europe… and the list could go on. What they all lack is clarity on the common objective and an effective process for making goal-oriented, mutually agreed decisions.
Multiple departmental plans
Every professional organization has a strategy: the clear goal guiding the entire company. But it seems that just a small percentage of companies are able to translate that strategy into targets and actions at the departmental level. As a result, managers and employees have little to no awareness of the strategy, don’t understand its relevance to them and are primarily focused on their own part of the business.
This leads to multiple departmental plans: Finance (budget, quarterly updates), Sales, Marketing, Supply Chain and Purchasing all draw up their own plans as the basis for their decision-making. Supply Chain brings together a number of these plans – at volume level, at least – to ensure that the right products are available in the right place at the right time to deliver on the Marketing and Sales plans. In recent years, many organizations have implemented an S&OP process to drive – and embed – this essential alignment between Sales, Marketing and Supply Chain.
IBP: integration of two planning cycles
Integrated Business Planning (IBP) supports the strategy by integrating the financial performance management cycle with the S&OP cycle – in most cases not by working with a single plan (in monetary and volume terms), but rather by aligning the separate plans once a month based on the same data and assumptions (the ‘one set of numbers’ approach).
IBP is typically a tightly managed cross-functional process in which a standard set of decisions are made at regular intervals based on thorough preparation. So in essence, IBP is also a decision-making process, with a clear mandate that is laid down in the company’s operating framework.
The path to IBP
So far, few organizations have actually succeeded in getting IBP to deliver on its promises. Implementation often turns out to be surprisingly difficult and complex, not least because many people don’t understand the ‘why’. Besides that, it’s not always possible to ensure the all-important availability of accurate data at the right aggregation level. Two developments offer hope in this context:
- The number of successful IBP implementations is growing steadily. In all cases, the value of the process is clearly demonstrated.
- Today’s planning systems increasingly offer more essential functionalities as standard. This is leading to the slow demise of the traditional use of Excel for processes such as volume-value conversions, aggregation-disaggregation, working with less structured data, and the rapid analysis and registration of what-if scenarios.
