case study integrated business planning

A better way to drive your business

Managing the availability of supply to meet volatile demand has never been easy. Even before the unprecedented challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, synchronizing supply and demand was a perennial struggle for most businesses. In a survey of 54 senior executives, only about one in four believed that the processes of their companies balanced cross-functional trade-offs effectively or facilitated decision making to help the P&L of the full business.

That’s not because of a lack of effort. Most companies have made strides to strengthen their planning capabilities in recent years. Many have replaced their processes for sales and operations planning (S&OP) with the more sophisticated approach of integrated business planning (IBP), which shows great promise, a conclusion based on an in-depth view of the processes used by many leading companies around the world (see sidebar “Understanding IBP”). Assessments of more than 170 companies, collected over five years, provide insights into the value created by IBP implementations that work well—and the reasons many IBP implementations don’t.

Understanding IBP

Integrated business planning is a powerful process that could become central to how a company runs its business. It is one generation beyond sales and operations planning. Three essential differentiators add up to a unique business-steering capability:

• Full business scope. Beyond balancing sales and operations planning, integrated business planning (IBP) synchronizes all of a company’s mid- and long-term plans, including the management of revenues, product pipelines and portfolios, strategic projects and capital investments, inventory policies and deployment, procurement strategies, and joint capacity plans with external partners. It does this in all relevant parts of the organization, from the site level through regions and business units and often up to a corporate-level plan for the full business.
• Risk management, alongside strategy and performance reviews. Best-practice IBP uses scenario planning to drive decisions. In every stage of the process, there are varying degrees of confidence about how the future will play out—how much revenue is reasonably certain as a result of consistent consumption patterns, how much additional demand might emerge if certain events happen, and how much unusual or extreme occurrences might affect that additional demand. These layers are assessed against business targets, and options for mitigating actions and potential gap closures are evaluated and chosen.
• Real-time financials. To ensure consistency between volume-based planning and financial projections (that is, value-based planning), IBP promotes strong links between operational and financial planning. This helps to eliminate surprises that may otherwise become apparent only in quarterly or year-end reviews.

An effective IBP process consists of five essential building blocks: a business-backed design; high-quality process management, including inputs and outputs; accountability and performance management; the effective use of data, analytics, and technology; and specialized organizational roles and capabilities (Exhibit 1). Our research finds that mature IBP processes can significantly improve coordination and reduce the number of surprises. Compared with companies that lack a well-functioning IBP process, the average mature IBP practitioner realizes one or two additional percentage points in EBIT. Service levels are five to 20 percentage points higher. Freight costs and capital intensity are 10 to 15 percent lower—and customer delivery penalties and missed sales are 40 to 50 percent lower. IBP technology and process discipline can also make planners 10 to 20 percent more productive.

When IBP processes are set up correctly, they help companies to make and execute plans and to monitor, simulate, and adapt their strategic assumptions and choices to succeed in their markets. However, leaders must treat IBP not just as a planning-process upgrade but also as a company-wide business initiative (see sidebar “IBP in action” for a best-in-class example).

IBP in action

One global manufacturer set up its integrated business planning (IBP) system as the sole way it ran its entire business, creating a standardized, integrated process for strategic, tactical, and operational planning. Although the company had previously had a sales and operations planning (S&OP) process, it had been owned and led solely by the supply chain function. Beyond S&OP, the sales function forecast demand in aggregate dollar value at the category level and over short time horizons. Finance did its own projections of the quarterly P&L, and data from day-by-day execution fed back into S&OP only at the start of a new monthly cycle.

The CEO endorsed a new way of running regional P&Ls and rolling up plans to the global level. The company designed its IBP process so that all regional general managers owned the regional IBP by sponsoring the integrated decision cycles (following a global design) and by ensuring functional ownership of the decision meetings. At the global level, the COO served as tiebreaker whenever decisions—such as procurement strategies for global commodities, investments in new facilities for global product launches, or the reconfiguration of a product’s supply chain—cut across regional interests.

To enable IBP to deliver its impact, the company conducted a structured process assessment to evaluate the maturity of all inputs into IBP. It then set out to redesign, in detail, its processes for planning demand and supply, inventory strategies, parametrization, and target setting, so that IBP would work with best-practice inputs. To encourage collaboration, leaders also started to redefine the performance management system so that it included clear accountability for not only the metrics that each function controlled but also shared metrics. Finally, digital dashboards were developed to track and monitor the realization of benefits for individual functions, regional leaders, and the global IBP team.

A critical component of the IBP rollout was creating a company-wide awareness of its benefits and the leaders’ expectations for the quality of managers’ contributions and decision-making discipline. To educate and show commitment from the CEO down, this information was rolled out in a campaign of town halls and media communications to all employees. The company also set up a formal capability-building program for the leaders and participants in the IBP decision cycle.

Rolled out in every region, the new training helps people learn how to run an effective IBP cycle, to recognize the signs of good process management, and to internalize decision authority, thresholds, and escalation paths. Within a few months, the new process, led by a confident and motivated leadership team, enabled closer company-wide collaboration during tumultuous market conditions. That offset price inflation for materials (which adversely affected peers) and maintained the company’s EBITDA performance.

Our research shows that these high-maturity IBP examples are in the minority. In practice, few companies use the IBP process to support effective decision making (Exhibit 2). For two-thirds of the organizations in our data set, IBP meetings are periodic business reviews rather than an integral part of the continuous cycle of decisions and adjustments needed to keep organizations aligned with their strategic and tactical goals. Some companies delegate IBP to junior staff. The frequency of meetings averages one a month. That can make these processes especially ineffective—lacking either the senior-level participation for making consequential strategic decisions or the frequency for timely operational reactions.

Finally, most companies struggle to turn their plans into effective actions: critical metrics and responsibilities are not aligned across functions, so it’s hard to steer the business in a collaborative way. Who is responsible for the accuracy of forecasts? What steps will be taken to improve it? How about adherence to the plan? Are functions incentivized to hold excess inventory? Less than 10 percent of all companies have a performance management system that encourages the right behavior across the organization.

By contrast, at the most effective organizations, IBP meetings are all about decisions and their impact on the P&L—an impact enabled by focused metrics and incentives for collaboration. Relevant inputs (data, insights, and decision scenarios) are diligently prepared and syndicated before meetings to help decision makers make the right choices quickly and effectively. These companies support IBP by managing their short-term planning decisions prescriptively, specifying thresholds to distinguish changes immediately integrated into existing plans from day-to-day noise. Within such boundaries, real-time daily decisions are made in accordance with the objectives of the entire business, not siloed frontline functions. This responsive execution is tightly linked with the IBP process, so that the fact base is always up-to-date for the next planning iteration.

A better plan for IBP

In our experience, integrated business planning can help a business succeed in a sustainable way if three conditions are met. First, the process must be designed for the P&L owner, not individual functions in the business. Second, processes are built for purpose, not from generic best-practice templates. Finally, the people involved in the process have the authority, skills, and confidence to make relevant, consequential decisions.

Design for the P&L owner

IBP gives leaders a systematic opportunity to unlock P&L performance by coordinating strategies and tactics across traditional business functions. This doesn’t mean that IBP won’t function as a business review process, but it is more effective when focused on decisions in the interest of the whole business. An IBP process designed to help P&L owners make effective decisions as they run the company creates requirements different from those of a process owned by individual functions, such as supply chain or manufacturing.

One fundamental requirement is senior-level participation from all stakeholder functions and business areas, so that decisions can be made in every meeting. The design of the IBP cycle, including preparatory work preceding decision-making meetings, should help leaders make general decisions or resolve minor issues outside of formal milestone meetings. It should also focus the attention of P&L leaders on the most important and pressing issues. These goals can be achieved with disciplined approaches to evaluating the impact of decisions and with financial thresholds that determine what is brought to the attention of the P&L leader.

The aggregated output of the IBP process would be a full, risk-evaluated business plan covering a midterm planning horizon. This plan then becomes the only accepted and executed plan across the organization. The objective isn’t a single hard number. It is an accepted, unified view of which new products will come online and when, and how they will affect the performance of the overall portfolio. The plan will also take into account the variabilities and uncertainties of the business: demand expectations, how the company will respond to supply constraints, and so on. Layered risks and opportunities and aligned actions across stakeholders indicate how to execute the plan.

Would you like to learn more about our Operations Practice ?

Trade-offs arising from risks and opportunities in realizing revenues, margins, or cost objectives are determined by the P&L owner at the level where those trade-offs arise—local for local, global for global. To make this possible, data visible in real time and support for decision making in meetings are essential. This approach works best in companies with strong data governance processes and tools, which increase confidence in the objectivity of the IBP process and support for implementing the resulting decisions. In addition, senior leaders can demonstrate their commitment to the value and the standards of IBP by participating in the process, sponsoring capability-building efforts for the teams that contribute inputs to the IBP, and owning decisions and outcomes.

Fit-for-purpose process design and frequency

To make IBP a value-adding capability, the business will probably need to redesign its planning processes from a clean sheet.

First, clean sheeting IBP means that it should be considered and designed from the decision maker’s perspective. What information does a P&L owner need to make a decision on a given topic? What possible scenarios should that leader consider, and what would be their monetary and nonmonetary impact? The IBP process can standardize this information—for example, by summarizing it in templates so that the responsible parties know, up front, which data, analytics, and impact information to provide.

Second, essential inputs into IBP determine its quality. These inputs include consistency in the way planners use data, methods, and systems to make accurate forecasts, manage constraints, simulate scenarios, and close the loop from planning to the production shopfloor by optimizing schedules, monitoring adherence, and using incentives to manufacture according to plan.

Determining the frequency of the IBP cycle, and its timely integration with tactical execution processes, would also be part of this redesign. Big items—such as capacity investments and divestments, new-product introductions, and line extensions—should be reviewed regularly. Monthly reviews are typical, but a quarterly cadence may also be appropriate in situations with less frequent changes. Weekly iterations then optimize the plan in response to confirmed orders, short-term capacity constraints, or other unpredictable events. The bidirectional link between planning and execution must be strong, and investments in technology may be required to better connect them, so that they use the same data repository and have continuous-feedback loops.

Authorize consequential decision making

Finally, every IBP process step needs autonomous decision making for the problems in its scope, as well as a clear path to escalate, if necessary. The design of the process must therefore include decision-type authority, decision thresholds, and escalation paths. Capability-building interventions should support teams to ensure disciplined and effective decision making—and that means enforcing participation discipline, as well. The failure of a few key stakeholders to prioritize participation can undermine the whole process.

Decision-making autonomy is also relevant for short-term planning and execution. Success in tactical execution depends on how early a problem is identified and how quickly and effectively it is resolved. A good execution framework includes, for example, a classification of possible events, along with resolution guidelines based on root cause methodology. It should also specify the thresholds, in scope and scale of impact, for operational decision making and the escalation path if those thresholds are met.

Transforming supply chains: Do you have the skills to accelerate your capabilities?

In addition to guidelines for decision making, the cross-functional team in charge of executing the plan needs autonomy to decide on a course of action for events outside the original plan, as well as the authority to see those actions implemented. Clear integration points between tactical execution and the IBP process protect the latter’s focus on midterm decision making and help tactical teams execute in response to immediate market needs.

An opportunity, but no ‘silver bullet’

With all the elements described above, IBP has a solid foundation to create value for a business. But IBP is no silver bullet. To achieve a top-performing supply chain combining timely and complete customer service with optimal cost and capital expenditures, companies also need mature planning and fulfillment processes using advanced systems and tools. That would include robust planning discipline and a collaboration culture covering all time horizons with appropriate processes while integrating commercial, planning, manufacturing, logistics, and sourcing organizations at all relevant levels.

As more companies implement advanced planning systems and nerve centers , the typical monthly IBP frequency might no longer be appropriate. Some companies may need to spend more time on short-term execution by increasing the frequency of planning and replanning. Others may be able to retain a quarterly IBP process, along with a robust autonomous-planning or exception engine. Already, advanced planning systems not only direct the valuable time of experts to the most critical demand and supply imbalances but also aggregate and disaggregate large volumes of data on the back end. These targeted reactions are part of a critical learning mechanism for the supply chain.

Over time, with root cause analyses and cross-functional collaboration on systemic fixes, the supply chain’s nerve center can get smarter at executing plans, separating noise from real issues, and proactively managing deviations. All this can eventually shorten IBP cycles, without the risk of overreacting to noise, and give P&L owners real-time transparency into how their decisions might affect performance.

P&L owners thinking about upgrading their S&OP or IBP processes can’t rely on textbook checklists. Instead, they can assume leadership of IBP and help their organizations turn strategies and plans into effective actions. To do so, they must sponsor IBP as a cross-functional driver of business decisions, fed by thoughtfully designed processes and aligned decision rights, as well as a performance management and capability-building system that encourages the right behavior and learning mechanisms across the organization. As integrated planning matures, supported by appropriate technology and maturing supply chain–management practices, it could shorten decision times and accelerate its impact on the business.

Elena Dumitrescu is a senior knowledge expert in McKinsey’s Toronto office, Matt Jochim is a partner in the London office, and Ali Sankur is a senior expert and associate partner in the Chicago office, where Ketan Shah is a partner.

Explore a career with us

Related articles.

To improve your supply chain, modernize your supply-chain IT

Supply-chain resilience: Is there a holy grail?

Digital transformation in a nutshell

Cracking the supply chain strategy in the cloud.

Call for change

A smarter solution for growth

Blue Diamond Growers is the world’s largest almond supplier and processing company. The co-operative represents more than 3,000 California almond growers, helping them realize the best return on investments while delivering a quality product. It achieves this by innovating to open new markets—a mission that saw it shift from purely supplying raw materials for integration into other products, to packaging products directly for the consumer market. Blue Diamond Growers’ supply chain became incredibly complex as a result, with disjointed spreadsheet systems that made it a challenge to forecast supply and demand. The company realized its growth depended on a smarter, customer-focused supply chain management solution and set about creating one with Accenture.

When tech meets human ingenuity

Pivoting in a pandemic

Accenture collaborated with Blue Diamond Growers to design, build and launch a globally scalable, customer-centric, flexible supply chain planning solution based on SAP® Integrated Business Planning (IBP). Accenture’s virtual training ensured the entire Blue Diamond Growers team was proficient in the solution well ahead of launch. The solution, integrated with the on-premises SAP system, enabled real-time consolidation, validation and analysis of supply chain data, providing greater transparency for planning purposes.

When the pandemic struck, the company switched to a daily planning cycle with a joint SAP IBP and Accenture solution, Supply Chain Scenario Planning-as-a-Service. Simulation scenarios harnessed Accenture templates to quickly extract data and help in the reallocation of Blue Diamond Growers’ nut supply to satisfy shifting demands.

A valuable difference

Forecasting to future-proof

Blue Diamond Growers has transitioned from a disjointed, multi-system spreadsheet supply chain approach to a fully integrated, cloud-based solution that provides a single source of truth for demand and supply planning.

A single dashboard view helped improve forecast accuracy by 10% within the first six months of launch, enabling teams to optimize inventory. Teams spend less time manually sifting through data and can focus on higher value strategic activities. Supply Chain Scenario Planning-as-a-Service helped the company switch to a daily planning cycle to meet increased demand and manage warehouse capacity when local lockdowns hit. SAP S/4HANA® in the cloud is also now live, enhancing Blue Diamond Growers’ analytics and predictive capabilities. Accenture is supporting further projects, including the use of artificial intelligence to predict harvests.

{{data.title}}

Did you mean this address, no use the address that was entered., please log in., you must log in or contact customer service., we were unable to validate the address you entered..

You can still proceed with your address as entered, but an incorrect address may result in billing or shipping delays.

You currently have an ASCM Plus Student Membership

Your current ASCM Plus membership with Student discount expired is set to expire on {{data.renewalModal.membershipExpirationDate}}. You will need to go through the verification process again. If you are no longer a student, you can either renew as a professional without a discount or see what other discount plans you may be eligible for.

You currently have an ASCM Plus Academic Membership

Your current ASCM Plus membership with Academic discount expired is set to expire on {{data.renewalModal.membershipExpirationDate}}. You will need to go through the validation process again nto renew with your current discount level. If you are no longer academic, you can either renew as a professional without a discount or see what other discount plans you may be eligible for.

You currently have an ASCM Plus Young Professional Membership

Your current ASCM Plus membership with Young Professional discount expired is set to expire on {{data.renewalModal.membershipExpirationDate}} and you are no longer eligible for this membership plan . You may be able to renew as a Young Professional if you're still within a 2 year period from when you graduated college. You will need to go through the verification process again. If you have eclipsed that period, you will need to upgrade to a professional membership but there are other discounts that may apply.

You currently have an ASCM Core Young Professional Membership

Your current ASCM Core membership with Young Professional discount expired is set to expire on {{data.renewalModal.membershipExpirationDate}} and you are no longer eligible for this membership plan . You may be able to renew as a Young Professional if you're still within a 2 year period from when you graduated college. You will need to go through the verification process again. If you have eclipsed that period, you will need to upgrade to a professional membership but there are other discounts that may apply.

Upgrade to Plus and Save

Upgrade to a Plus level membership and take advantage of additional benefits and savings with discounts on all your certifications.

You currently have an ASCM Plus Professional Membership

Your current ASCM Plus Professional membership expired is set to expire on {{data.renewalModal.membershipExpirationDate}}.

You currently have an ASCM Core Professional Membership

Your current ASCM Core Professional membership expired is set to expire on {{data.renewalModal.membershipExpirationDate}}.

You currently have an ASCM Plus Active Military Membership

Your current ASCM Plus membership with Active Military discount that expired is set to expire on {{data.renewalModal.membershipExpirationDate}}. You will need to go through the validation process again nto renew with your current discount level. If you are no longer active duty, you can either renew as a professional without a discount or see what other discount plans you may be eligible for.

You currently have an ASCM Plus Federal Employee Membership

Your current ASCM Plus membership with Federal Discount expired is set to expire on {{data.renewalModal.membershipExpirationDate}}. You will need to go through the validation process again to renew with your current discount level. If you are no longer a federal employee, you can either renew as a professional without a discount or see what other discount plans you may be eligible for.

Looks like you already have an ASCM membership in your cart. Would you like to discard the membership in your cart?

Looks like you already have an Bundled ASCM membership in your cart.

• Become a Member
• Cart  ({{data.quantity}})
• 0" class="header-mobile-nav-item-quantity"> {{data.quantity}}
• ASCM Insights
• Making the Case for Integrated Business Planning

By: Henry Canitz

Increasingly, company executives are viewing supply chain functions as critical to business success. This shift has driven initiatives across organizations that aim to improve performance, lead to more effective decision-making processes, and balance and align supply and demand.

According to the Aberdeen Group report “Sales and Operations Planning: Strategies for Managing Complexity within Global Supply Chains,” being best in class versus a laggard in these areas can result in a 47 percent increase in year-over-year gross profit margins, a 2.7 percent decrease in year-over-year cash-to-cash cycle time, a 28 percent improvement in orders that are on-time-in-full and a 31 percent better forecast accuracy three months out. Research firms, solution providers, subject matter experts and even end users have difficulty agreeing on an industry standard term for this process. Some refer to it as sales and operations planning (S&OP) or sales, inventory and operations planning (SIOP); in the retail world, you can find merchandizing, inventory and operations execution (MIOE), or simply integrated planning; and others opt for integrated business planning (IBP).

Regardless of the name, its importance to company health is obvious, as it can significantly lower costs, increase agility, improve Customer Relations and boost profits. The industry may settle on a term one day. Until then, three overlapping concepts — executional, tactical and strategic planning — can help clarify the objectives and potential of this methodology.

Executional planning deals with balancing and aligning supply and demand in the near-term, often within the span of a planning cycle. Decisions tend to be prompted by exceptions and disruptions — and thus are made on the fly to ensure customer orders are met and financial objectives are made. This near-term planning horizon involves workflow; exception-based messaging; alerts; and visibility to supply, demand and transportation. Often, specific scenarios are analyzed — for example, if a customer order can be accepted, if people should work overtime or if expedited shipping is the best option.

Tactical planning encompasses just a few months to 18 months or more, depending on the business. The goal is to plan at an aggregated level and then make effective midcourse adjustments in resources and partners in order to respond to changes in demand. Activities include new product introduction planning, decisions about product life cycles, product-family-level demand projections, running high-level capacity analyses, optimizing inventory positions and making any adjustments that are necessary to meet expected demand while aligning with company objectives.

A multitude of scenarios can be run, including optimistic versus pessimistic plans, inventory postponement trade-offs, whether to add suppliers or production capacity, transportation and warehousing alternatives, and more.

Strategic planning describes high-level balancing and alignment over a long time horizon. Companies may look out three, five or 10 years to plan for new category introductions, moving a plant or warehouse, or entering new countries or regions. Some call this IBP, while others also include tactical and strategic activities under the IBP umbrella. Alternative scenarios are used to make financial projections, plan investments and compare potential strategies through volumetric and financial metrics.

With these three concepts in mind, consider the following breakdowns of the different tactics:

• S&OP is an integrated business management process through which an executive team continually achieves focus, alignment and synchronization among all functions of the organization. In practice, S&OP processes rarely stretch far enough to cover all the bases of integrated, tactical and strategic business planning and tend to focus on developing a demand consensus or tactical volumetric supply and demand balancing. 
• SIOP is, frankly, a superfluous attempt to emphasize the importance of inventory. It’s unnecessary, but if you need to use this term to move your program forward, please continue to do so. Like S&OP, most SIOP processes focus on tactical volumetric balancing, rather than delivering true integrated planning capabilities.
• MIOE aims to establish a periodic planning process that meets the requirements of each business function, integrates company strategy with execution activities, and balances supply and demand while exceeding customer expectations. Retail planning activities — including merchandize planning, allocation, replenishment, and distribution and transportation — parallel the elements of what manufacturers call S&OP.
• IBP focuses on ensuring continuous alignment among demand, inventory, supply and manufacturing plans on the one hand, and between the tactical and strategic business plans on the other, in an effort to maximize operational performance and meet financial objectives. IBP is a fairly new competitive weapon for supply chain leaders in the battle to accelerate, direct and optimize business decisions for both near- and longterm planning. IBP encompasses S&OP, SIOP and MIOE across all time horizons.

Whether key stakeholders hail from sales, inventory, marketing, purchasing, production or finance functions, they are all from the same business and engaged in planning activities that are closely integrated. In this way, IBP is the best term to describe the regular actions, behaviors and processes that heighten performance, bring about better decision-making, and optimize supply and demand.

Ensure IBP success

The following step-by-step checklist comprises the main capabilities necessary to maximize IBP:

• Smoothly integrate S&OP and strategic planning under one comprehensive process. Align and synchronize your strategic and tactical planning, including S&OP, annual operations, and financial and strategic business planning. IBP should encompass strategic plans, initiatives, activities, and regional and multidivisional operational plans.
• Perform fast simulations, comparisons and what-if scenarios. You need unprecedented global visibility in order to drive a higher level of proactive decision-making. Make sure your team can model the entire supply chain, including plants, suppliers, storage facilities, partner capabilities, customer locations and lanes of transportation, so you can identify any disconnects between supply and demand months or years in advance.
• Compare actual performance to the plan. Global supply chains are always in motion. You need to quickly detect the differences between plans and actuals and then respond in an efficient manner. The ability to sense and highlight shifts in the extended supply chain — particularly as they relate to the agreed-upon plan — is vital. Then, you should be able to suggest an optimal solution while adhering to predetermined company goals and objectives through multiple scenario comparisons.
• Develop plans that evaluate both financial and volumetric performance. Establishing one comprehensive plan that spans strategic and tactical horizons reveals the true merits of multiple alternative paths. Break away from silos, and combine information from sales, marketing, production, procurement, transportation, finance and external partners in a single system to keep your team aligned while streamlining planning processes and responding effectively to supply chain disruptions or new opportunities. A good question to ask is, In addition to balancing financial criteria against constraints, demand prioritization and Customer Relations objectives, can we analyze alternative scenarios based on revenue, profit, capacities, Customer Relations and other critical business metrics?
• Plan across global, regional and multidivisional organizations. Although global supply chains continue to increase in complexity, often the biggest opportunities for cost reduction and Customer Relations improvements lie in the ability to manage the entire supply chain as a system. It’s important to be able to adapt to regional differences in business processes, currencies, objectives, metrics and supply chain structures in order shift regional plans into a consolidated strategy and identify previously hidden opportunities.
• Assess timing, impact and risk of new product introductions. With the number and frequency of launches on the rise, the need to address this area is critical because the most difficult planning problems often occur here. New product planning often takes place across multiple functions or even organizations. IBP can help facilitate this process through collaborative workflow and active messaging. In addition, the ability to compare the performance of a new product to the agreed-upon plan, quickly identify deviations and provide rich what-if analysis plays a major role in determining appropriate actions.
• Visualize operational risk and develop mitigation plans. Disruptions happen more often in today’s globally complex supply chains. For many, it’s only a matter of when, where and how often disruptions will affect Customer Relations and company profitability. The ability to visualize operational risk with enough detail, accuracy and lead time to successfully mitigate the potential hazards is a key business capability. You must sense disruptions and highlight data to enable management by exception. Again, powerful what-if analyses, network scenarios and graphical comparisons help identify an optimal response.
• Model your business over multiple time horizons. Most organizations perform both short-term tactical and long-term planning, at least in some form. In many cases, these processes land on conflicting paths forward because the planning is disconnected and run by different sets of people using different data, assumptions and supporting systems. Effective IBP requires all business-planning efforts across all time horizons to be synchronized. IBP is an effective tool in this regard because it supports the needs of all planning efforts and makes it easier for changes made in one plan to be reflected in others at the appropriate levels of aggregation and in suitable units and time horizons.
• Evaluate alternate product aggregations. Every business function needs to plan at different levels of aggregation to support its goals. Purchasing considers data by supplier; manufacturing views data by what is produced; transportation is concerned with optimizing lanes and loads; sales strategizes by region, customer and account; finance plans by business; and executive management reviews data on company performance. The plans of the various functions have unique purposes, but they all must be coordinated and based on uniform data. A flexible IBP data hierarchy enables simple, real-time changes to data aggregation.

Moving forward together

IBP is powerful because it brings together the often-fragmented worlds of strategic and tactical planning. In this way, the methodology can provide continuous alignment among supply, demand, inventory, manufacturing, tactical and strategic business plans in order to maximize operational performance and meet financial objectives. Now is the time to drive change in your organization.

About the Author

Henry Canitz Product Marketing & Business Development Director, Nulogy

• Operational Excellence

Related Posts

Five Tips for IBP Transformation Success

By: Ehap Sabri, PhD, CFPIM, LSSMBB

S&OP and The Digital Supply Chain

By: Gregory L. Schlegel, CPIM

5 Steps to Enjoyable and Productive S&OP Meetings

By: Christian Velazquez, CSCP

ASCM is an unbiased partner, connecting companies around the world with industry experts, frameworks and global standards to transform supply chains.

Get the Latest ASCM and Supply Chain News

• Global Network
• Careers at ASCM
• Manage Membership
• Learning Opportunities
• Credential Verification
• Return Policy
• Pay Invoice

Other Properties

• Learning System Login
• Cookie Settings
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use
• © Copyright ASCM 2024.

Your Discount Has Been Applied

Your discount has been successfully applied and will be reflected after adding items to your cart.

This Discount is No Longer Available

No discount could be applied as either the affiliated link has expired or is invalid.

ASCM Membership Terms and Conditions and ASCM Privacy Policy

Ascm privacy policy, ascm membership terms.

The ASCM Membership Terms and Conditions and ASCM Privacy Policy have changed. Please review the ASCM Membership Terms and Conditions and ASCM Privacy Policy and indicate your acceptance by clicking below. Until you indicate acceptance, you will be unable to log in to the ascm.org website.

If you have questions or concerns, please contact ASCM Customer Relations at 1-800-444-2742 or +1-773-867-1777 or email [email protected] .

The ASCM Privacy Policy has changed. Please review the ASCM Privacy Policy and indicate your acceptance by clicking below. Until you indicate acceptance, you will be unable to log in to any ASCM website .

The ASCM Membership Terms and Conditions has changed. Please review the ASCM Membership Terms and Conditions and indicate your acceptance by clicking below. Until you indicate acceptance, you will be unable to log in to the ascm.org website.

Membership Auto-Renewal

Your current ASCM membership is set to renew on [[dateToken]]

If you have any questions please contact us .

The membership has been removed from your cart.

Membership Already in Cart

There is already a membership in your cart. Remove membership and add bundle to the cart?

There is already a bundle with a membership in your cart. Remove the bundle and add membership to the cart?

There is already a membership in the cart. Remove membership and add bundle to cart? Only one bundle can be purchased per transaction. If purchasing multiple bundles, please complete your purchase before continuing with another.

• Expert Network
• Vendor Directory
• Research Reports
• Become an Insider

Share this Article

Key topics discussed.

• Case Studies

Making the Journey to SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP)

Reading time: 3 mins

Meet the Authors

Mark Vigoroso

Chief Content Officer, SAPinsider

Key Takeaways

⇨ at the mastering sap gold coast event, australia's nuclear science and technology organization (ansto) shared how it evolved from supply chain planning with excel to a cloud-based model leveraging sap integrated business planning (ibp).., ⇨ ansto is able to perform planning tasks previously impossible in an excel environment, such as customer categorization., ⇨ with ibp, the organization has been able to reduce its dependence on imports and is saving at least $1 million per year..

At this year’s Mastering SAP Gold Coast conference, Cornelia Boonstra, leader of integrated business planning at ANSTO, shared the story of how the organization evolved from supply chain planning solely with Excel spreadsheets to a cloud-based model leveraging SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP). In this highlight from the presentation, you will learn how ANSTO was able to move on from an Excel-based solution to SAP’s cloud-based IBP solution, which carried the promise of true statistical forecasting capabilities and the ability to generate forecast error calculations. You will gain key lessons from ANSTO's first failed deployment, as well as insights into the benefits that IBP can offer to users.

More Resources

Transform Supply Chain and Financial Operations with Cross-Functional Analytics: The GKN Story

How to Build a Resilient and Efficient Supply Chain With Robust Sales and Operations Planning Using SAP IBP S4HANA

Reading time: 9 mins

Logisitics and SCM: Case study: The Vestas Wind Systems story — Using SAP Integrated Business Planning to improve the S&OP process

Reading time: 1 mins

Featured Insiders

Manager SCM, SAP Deutschland Gmbh & Co KG

Narasimha Prasad Bhat

Independent Consultant

Global Director, Solution Management, Supply Chain Planning at SAP

Become a Member

Unlimited access to thousands of resources for SAP-specific expertise that can only be found here.

Upcoming Events

Register Now: Supply Chain Management Summit 2024

May 01 - 02, 2024

Chicago, IL

Sign Up for the SAPInsider Weekly

Always have access to the latest insights with articles, Q&As, whitepapers, webinars, and podcasts. Gain the inside edge. The SAPinsider Weekly helps you stay SAP savvy. Access exclusive bonus materials, discounts, and more.

Your request has been successfully sent

Privacy Overview

• United States

Integrated planning: The key to agile enterprise performance management

Facebook Twitter Linked In E-mail this page

Table of contents

What is integrated planning, change as a given: the truth about plans, planning across the organization, the ultimate integrated planning solution.

• Need for real-time insights
• Integrated planning
• Agile and ready organizations
• Integrated planning drives better results

Integration is key to streamlined planning, budgeting, and forecasting. In order to adapt to today's quickly changing business conditions, you need an enterprise performance management solution that creates a single source of truth and delivers speed and agility to your planning process.

Did you know that 33 percent of critical information is delivered late?

The delay of critical information can cause a ripple effect that drives poor decision making and poor results. Today’s business simply cannot afford this type of cost in our customer-centric environment, where data is one of our most valuable assets. To stay ahead of the competition, businesses rely on a solution that can deliver acceleration, agility, and collaboration in every part of the organization.

Integrated planning ensures all parts of the organization are connected and planning is streamlined.

A must in the culture of “now.”

In virtually all industries, work has become more interactive and collaborative. More sharing is required, and more data is available than ever before. Success means integrating information across strategic and operational perspectives, as well as different functional and external sources.

Integrated planning mirrors the modern way we do business — it elevates the critical value of collaboration and cuts through data silos, driving more access to information and faster insights. Leaders use highly collaborative approaches to plan, budget, and forecast. Business planning requires accurate and complete data and buy-in across the entire organization, both from the top down and the bottom up. It sounds simple, but organizational silos are some of the biggest obstacles to accomplishing good work because they hinder critical decisions that strategically steer the business. And at the modern enterprise, silos are everywhere.

Integrated planning starts with a sophisticated planning platform that everyone in the organization can use, creating one source of truth. Data from diverse data sources such as ERPs, CRMs, and HRMs is unified, so users can access the information they need when they need it. Integrated planning helps ensure that plans, budgets, and forecasts are created with a holistic approach. Trends are easier to spot and quickly act on with more accurate and reliable plans. According to analysts at the Aberdeen Group , those organizations that champion data accessibility and collaboration between stakeholders promote organizational accountability and decrease time-to-decisions while increasing revenue. 1

The fact of the matter is that without effective communication, coordination, and collaboration between stakeholders, there is no way to improve organizational performance. 1

Bringing together people, data, and technology leaves organizations well-poised for optimal performance. Most importantly, integrated planning enables employees to be agile in responding to changing circumstances and able make the best decisions possible — all at the speed of modern business.

According to an Aberdeen study, 1 leaders who adopt enterprise performance management tools show a keen understanding of the importance of collaboration. They recognize that to make data driven decisions, they need to make all information accessible by integrating data and breaking down silos. Figure 1 shows steps taken by leaders to democratize data and drive more accurate forecasts.

Leaders put a high value on data integration and accessibility. They see the value of providing real-time data to decision makers and taking the guesswork out of forecasting. These strategies create comprehensive, actionable visibility into overall company performance and drive better results.

Gartner Predicts by 2020, at least 25 percent of large organizations will increase planning accuracy by integrating key operational planning processes with financial planning and analysis. 2

Do you have an integrated view of your data?

I do not feel confident in where to find comprehensive data, even for just my department

I have a good handle on my own departmental data (but only mine)

I have access to my data and that of other departments that impact my planning

IBM Planning Analytics helps Deutsche Bahn unite its global enterprise

Deutsche Bahn AG is a German railway company, and one of the largest IBM Planning Analytics customers with over 6,000 users worldwide. Deutsche Bahn uses IBM Planning Analytics to unite their wide-ranging operations across the globe, ensuring that the most accurate data is being used to create critical plans and forecasts that drive their business forward.

The truth about plans is that they always change. The goal of a dynamic, integrated planning approach is not to create a perfect, fixed plan. It’s to use all the resources available to create the most accurate, flexible and transparent plan possible, using a solution that does more than just plan — it analyzes data, reveals trends, and allows for real-time iteration.

Better, quicker access to data means faster and more informed decisions, laying the foundation for an organization to be agile and ready to pivot when changing business conditions demand.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “great, the finance team integrates all our plans, so we are off the hook,” think again. While we’d like to think that finance is the well-informed master of plans, miraculously weaving them together in perfect harmony and balance, that’s not always the case. In fact, it rarely is. Many, many finance teams rely on the manual collection of data into spreadsheets, which are often disconnected. Remember that much of an organization’s critical planning starts outside of finance and never gets communicated back up the chain or across the organization. There are simply too many top-down and bottom-up communication problems. Spreadsheets only complicate smooth communications. When a finance person is collecting and analyzing budget spreadsheets from across the organization, there is high risk for error in the process of combining and editing, causing confusion at the highest levels. Contradictory data can inhibit a clear picture of what is actually going on and identifying business drivers or detractors. Spreadsheets have proven over and over to be a highly imperfect yet highly common business practice.

With real-time access to data, companies take the guesswork out of planning, decreasing time involved in forecasting and increasing forecast accuracy. 3

Bye bye, silos. Hello, cross-functional planning.

A centralized, automated solution for performance data and planning allows coordination between different parts of the business and enables more streamlined, accurate plans. Leadership needs to understand what is truly driving the business — what causes increases and decreases in revenue or demand. At every level, access to a full range of data is critical to understanding how change (both internal and external) impacts the business. Though planning often starts with finance, other areas of the business can benefit from a dynamic planning solution as well. Let’s dive into a few use cases.

Supply chain planning

The term “operations” covers an enormous range of business activities. But one that’s almost universal is supply chain management. Supply chain planners are under constant pressure to reduce costs, increase efficiency and improve margins. Unfortunately, too many of them lack visibility into data and are misaligned with other teams. One centralized tool can help connect operational tactics with financial plans to allocate resources more effectively in response to market opportunities or competitive threats. This helps planners avoid mismatched data across multiple spreadsheets and enables them to pivot in the case of supply chain disruptions.

“ Our managers all have quick, easy access to the latest operational data via detailed reports that help them make better-informed decisions to improve the efficiency of the entire supply chain. ”

- Homarjun Agrahari, Director, Advanced Analytics, FleetPride

Learn more about supply chain planning

Infographic Webinar Learn more

Workforce planning

A company is only as good its people. That’s why it’s so important to hire and retain the right talent. Alignment between HR, finance and operations is crucial to ensure that the right people are in the right roles at the right time in order to meet organizational demands. This is rarely a simple task and too often it involves manual spreadsheet-based processes. Ensuring that departmental staffing targets are in sync with broader organizational objectives requires high levels of planning integration.

“ Our business is based on people. IBM Analytics is helping us manage that critical asset much more efficiently and effectively than ever before. ”

- Nadia Bertoncini, Coordinator of Governance, Projects and HR Analytics for Latin America, Natura Cosméticos

Learn more about workforce planning

Infographic Aberdeen report Learn more

Sales planning

Misalignment between finance, marketing and sales could lead to investment in the wrong initiatives, missed opportunities and inaccurate revenue forecasts that can severely hinder sales growth. And in a fast-moving market, manual processes and siloed systems are detrimental to agility. Decisions that are based on outdated information can lead to misguided sales strategies and thus lost sales and lost revenue. It’s critical to unite data under one roof for one single view to boost sales and effectively manage sales people.

“ The sheer level of detail that IBM Planning Analytics provides is very impressive … We can calculate our sales and gross margins for each SKU in IBM Planning Analytics and generate insightful reports at the click of a button. As a result, senior managers can rapidly access the comprehensive information they need to make effective strategic decisions. ”

- Vince Mertens, Group Accounting and Consolidation Manager, Continental Foods

Learn more about sales planning

Marketing planning

Constantly changing customer preferences and rising customer expectations require marketers to interpret high volumes of data and respond appropriately. But siloed data systems give only a partial picture and hinder smart decision-making. In addition, marketing teams can be fragmented and often disconnected from sales. Siloed planning causes misalignment with overall marketing goals, driving misallocated spend on the wrong elements of the marketing mix. Manual, siloed processes reduce visibility into how marketing activities affect one another, how marketing and sales touches move a lead through the funnel and how marketing helps achieve overall financial and business goals.

“ We first needed a better handle on our sales data. With so many lines of business, channels, and franchisees, collecting and consolidating this information was something that we knew we could do better. ”

- Donald Neumann, Demand Manager, Grupo Boticário

Learn more about marketing planning

Ventana report Learn more Infographic

IT planning

With IT, you need a business case for every dollar spent. But balancing the IT needs of an entire organization with digital transformation objectives and constant technology innovation is no simple task, and often requires additional resources. That’s why it’s so important leverage a planning solution that keeps IT focused on the projects that matter, automates planning tasks, gives a clear view into resources available and helps measure ROI. It’s also critical to coordinate with both finance and human resources to ensure the right resources are provided for IT initiatives and projects.

“ A few years ago, my team probably spent around half their time just keeping everything running — now it’s around 10 percent. With the move to IBM Analytics in the IBM Cloud, we have 40 percent more time to focus on working with the business to add value. Instead of asking ‘how do I make it work?’ we ask ourselves ‘how do I make it better?’ It’s a quantum shift in mindset. ”

- Vimal Dev, Vice President – IT, Global Enterprise Applications Leader, Genpact

Learn more about IT planning

Learn more IBV report

Operations, sales, marketing, human resources and other departments and disciplines all have a need for fast, flexible planning and analysis. And all of them can use the same tools to provide insight and manage performance. When people in one part of the organization see how their decisions affect other parts of the organization, all of the activities will be better coordinated and drive better results. In fact, according to Aberdeen, leading organizations are those who align planning across departments at double the rate of laggards in areas like sales, marketing and finance.

Become a leader

With IBM Planning Analytics , you can break down silos and generate an integrated view of your departmental or organizational performance. The solution enables you to create more accurate forecasts, identify potential performance gaps before they occur and make resource allocation decisions quickly and intelligently. Using multidimensional modeling and scenario analysis, IBM Planning Analytics lets you drill down into your data to examine the ripple effects of alternative courses of action and understand how your decision will affect related areas of the organization and ultimately impact the bottom line.

Using what-if scenario analysis to make smarter decisions

With IBM Planning Analytics, you can build multidimensional models and perform “what-if” analysis to explore scenarios or test business assumptions. Creating and maintaining sophisticated models with advanced sandboxing capabilities is simple. Easily test business assumptions and model scenarios to immediately see the impact of alternative courses of action on before deciding to implement changes.

IBM Planning Analytics offers all areas of your business — finance, operations, HR, sales, marketing, operations, IT and more — the ability to solve problems today and respond to new challenges with agility tomorrow.

Click on any quadrant for more information.

Headcount and staffing planning

Salary and compensation planning

Successions planning

Corporate planning and, budgeting and forecasting

Strategy planning

Operational planning

Capital planning

Expense planning

Profitability analysis

Demand planning

Sales and operations planning

IT project planning

IT budgeting

IT portfolio management

Sales territory planning and quota planning

Sales forecasting

Sales capacity planning

Resource allocation

Marketing revenue planning and forecasting

Campaign optimization

Dive deeper into the solution

Find out if IBM Planning Analytics is right for you.

Download the white paper

Download and save the PDF version of this SmarterPaper.

Try the interactive demo

Experience an interactive demo to get a real taste of functionality.

Shortfall: CFOs worry that their teams aren’t ready to weather the disruption

Here are four issues that are holding back many finance organizations and possible solutions.

Integrated Business Planning

Succession planning

Corporate planning, budgeting and forecasting

Strategic planning

Captial planning

To read this content please select one of the options below:

Please note you do not have access to teaching notes, enabling integrated business planning through big data analytics: a case study on sales and operations planning.

International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management

ISSN : 0960-0035

Article publication date: 19 November 2020

Issue publication date: 2 July 2021

The purpose of this study is to investigate how big data analytics capabilities (BDAC) enable the implementation of integrated business planning (IBP) – the advanced form of sales and operations planning (S&OP) – by counteracting the increasing information processing requirements.

Design/methodology/approach

The research model is grounded in the organizational information processing theory (OIPT). An embedded single case study on a multinational agrochemical company with multiple geographically distinguished sub-units of analysis was conducted. Data were collected in workshops, semistructured interviews as well as direct observations and enriched by secondary data from internal company sources as well as publicly available sources.

The results show the relevancy of establishing BDAC within an organization to apply IBP by providing empirical evidence of BDA solutions in S&OP. The study highlights how BDAC increase an organization's information processing capacity and consequently enable efficient and effective S&OP. Practical guidance toward the development of tangible, human and intangible BDAC in a particular sequence is given.

Originality/value

This study is the first theoretically grounded, empirical investigation of S&OP implementation journeys under consideration of the impact of BDAC.

• Integrated business planning
• Sales and operations planning
• Demand and supply planning
• Big data analytics capabilities

Schlegel, A. , Birkel, H.S. and Hartmann, E. (2021), "Enabling integrated business planning through big data analytics: a case study on sales and operations planning", International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management , Vol. 51 No. 6, pp. 607-633. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPDLM-05-2019-0156

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited

Related articles

We’re listening — tell us what you think, something didn’t work….

Report bugs here

All feedback is valuable

Please share your general feedback

Join us on our journey

Platform update page.

Visit emeraldpublishing.com/platformupdate to discover the latest news and updates

Questions & More Information

Answers to the most commonly asked questions here

Integrated Business Planning

How to Integrate Planning Processes, Organizational Structures and Capabilities, and Leverage SAP IBP Technology

• Robert Kepczynski 0 ,
• Raghav Jandhyala 1 ,
• Ganesh Sankaran 2 ,
• Alecsandra Dimofte 3

Zurich, Switzerland

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

SAP LABS LLC, Tempe, USA

Walldorf, germany, sap switzerland, regensdorf, switzerland.

• Describes the Integrated Business Planning from the perspective of business and technology practitioners
• Covers in one book people, process and technology integration as key to success
• Considers operational, tactical and long term process implications

Part of the book series: Management for Professionals (MANAGPROF)

21k Accesses

12 Citations

1 Altmetric

• Table of contents

About this book

Authors and affiliations, about the authors, bibliographic information.

• Publish with us

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this book

• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

Licence this eBook for your library

Institutional subscriptions

Table of contents (9 chapters)

Front matter, recent past disconnected planning.

• Robert Kepczynski, Raghav Jandhyala, Ganesh Sankaran, Alecsandra Dimofte

Why Move to Integrated Business Planning

What makes integrated business planning, how to run ibp: use cases, how to manage organization and capability change, how to enable change with sap ibp technology, how to measure transformation success, how to build transformation path, “quo vadis” integrated business planning.

• sales and operations planning
• business transformation
• demand planning
• demand management
• finance in sales and operations planning
• organizational structures
• capabilities

Robert Kepczynski

Raghav Jandhyala

Ganesh Sankaran

Alecsandra Dimofte

Robert Kepczynski has more than 20 years’ experience in supply chain management and technology. Robert does assess, design and implement people capability models, process design and delivers efficient technology solutions. He is specialized in supply chain planning processes and technologies. Robert took business roles in plant supply / production planning and sequencing, inventory and materials management, warehouse and duty operations, costing and budgeting, in market IBP and S&OP, distribution planning, and in regional & global S&OP, forecasting, demand planning and demand management, and process ownership. Robert led x-functional transformation programs delivering functional optimization and differentiation. His production plant, market and global process experiences was valued in the 2nd worldwide SAP IBP implementation, which has started in 2013. This project proved that Robert has heart, head and hand for IBP.

Raghav Jandhyala is a Senior Director of ProductManagement at SAP for SAP IBP responsible for sales and operations planning and unified planning processes and best practices in IBP. Raghav has over 16 years of experience in different fields like Supply Chain Management, Retail and Banking along with strong technical background in development and adoption of business applications. Raghav held various roles in his career as business consultant, development architect, solutions manager and product manager. Raghav is responsible for developing the roadmap for S&OP solution and works with multiple IBP Customers for new innovations and as a trusted advisor for their global rollouts.

Ganesh Sankaran is a Supply Chain Management technology practitioner. Ganesh helps clients solve business problems and generate value from their supply chain processes, particularly in the planning domain. Ganesh possesses a skillset that combines deep theoretical insights in SCM and rich implementation experience in SAP solutions further enriched by around seven years of prior software development experience.

Alecsandra Dimofte is working for SAP where she started as a supply chain management consultant. Alecsandra was involved in several IBP / S&OP implementation projects which allowed her to play different roles, from integration consultant to functional design lead. Alecsandra contributed to the development of the S&OP practice within her delivery unit and to the growth of the IBP online community by active participation in the space dedicated to IBP.

Book Title : Integrated Business Planning

Book Subtitle : How to Integrate Planning Processes, Organizational Structures and Capabilities, and Leverage SAP IBP Technology

Authors : Robert Kepczynski, Raghav Jandhyala, Ganesh Sankaran, Alecsandra Dimofte

Series Title : Management for Professionals

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75665-3

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Business and Management , Business and Management (R0)

Copyright Information : Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-319-75664-6 Due: 12 June 2018

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-09292-4 Published: 11 February 2019

eBook ISBN : 978-3-319-75665-3 Published: 31 May 2018

Series ISSN : 2192-8096

Series E-ISSN : 2192-810X

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XIII, 265

Number of Illustrations : 237 b/w illustrations

Topics : Business Process Management , Information Systems Applications (incl. Internet) , Sales/Distribution , Supply Chain Management , Business Information Systems

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Integrated Business Planning 

Optimize strategic planning by connecting sales, operational, and financial processes into a transparent network of data-driven insights.

Alignment between strategic goals and financial & operational activities 

Transparent overview of the organizational processes , over 2 weeks of manual work saved per month .

Our client, a pharmaceutical company, had an outdated and disjointed S&OP process in place. Due to this, our client’s teams had long and desynchronized alignment processes between their departments. They used spreadsheets as the main alignment and analysis tool, which didn’t give enough information to align on the processes. 

We created a system of integrated Anaplan models for each of their departments – Demand, Supply, FP&A, and Commercial budget planning. We also implemented a statistical forecasting tool to compliment the Demand planning initiatives.  Using our Anaplan solution, the teams were now constantly communicating and providing accurate real-time information on the progress status and any updates coming along the way. The integration between the models allowed the demand planners to instantly access the supply chain analysis. They could now make data-informed decisions and generate accurate demand plans, which was then distributed to the financial controllers for a proper planning process.  We also added an enhanced reporting capability that gives both analysts and VPs the insights they need for their day-to-day decision-making, available a click away. 

We managed to reduce the consolidated S&OP process from more than 2 weeks every month to less than a week. Additionally, our client was able to get rid of the back-and-forth sending of spreadsheets and substitute it with an efficient automated process with a global access to the system. The demand planners’ and financial analysts’ time was reallocated from generating spreadsheets for HQ reports to launching a few automated processes and distributing those reports with a click of the button.

Technologies

Open positions.

+1 888 564 1235 [email protected] 580 California Street 12th Floor San Francisco, California 94104

+1 888 564 1235 [email protected] 300 Delaware Avenue, Suite 210 Wilmington, DE 19801

Integrated Business Planning

For integrating functional plans, deploying business strategy, and driving business management, what is integrated business planning (ibp).

Integrated Business Planning (IBP) is a common-sense process designed for effective decision-making and led by your leadership team. True business integration means senior management can plan and manage the entire organization over a 24-36 month horizon, aligning strategic and tactical plans each month, and allocating critical resources, people, equipment, inventory, materials, time, and money; to satisfy your customers in the most profitable way.

Integrated Business Planning represents the evolution of Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) from the supply and demand balancing process developed in the early 1980s. Today it is a process that drives the alignment of all functions across an organization, models and creates readiness for alternate outcomes, drives deployment of strategy, and enhances collaboration across supply chains.

What is the difference between S&OP and IBP?

There are many differences between Sales & Operations Planning and Integrated Business Planning, but firstly it’s important to note that IBP is not a supply chain process ; it has a much broader reach. IBP is the process that connects your strategy and business plan to ensure both are delivered.

The purpose of IBP is not to drive a better forecast with which supply chain can plan. It is the process that brings focus to the deployment of your business strategy and provides a framework for effective decision-making to drive growth.

It's also much more than just a monthly meeting. IBP is a company framework to surface and solve problems and continually re-optimize plans as circumstances change. IBP enables businesses to create an aligned, cross-functional plan for the future, based upon key assumptions. These assumptions, documented and updated each month, are based on insights.

Read our white paper to learn more about what sets Integrated Business Planning apart from Sales & Operations Planning.

Looking for help with IBP software?

Oliver Wight IBP Powered by Board is a holistic solution combining Oliver Wight's industry-leading Class A and implementation change management processes with Board software. Fully align people, processes, and technology and embed IBP and its benefits for years to come.

This offering combines IBP technology and process in one package for rapid time to value. You will benefit from Oliver Wight consulting and education + Board Intelligent Planning Platform + specialist implementation services. 

Find out more.

How mature is your organization's true level of maturity in IBP?

Before embarking on any performance improvement program, it is imperative to identify your organization's true level of maturity. The Oliver Wight Maturity Model characterizes an organization as being in one of four key phases of maturity: Co-ordination, Business Process Control, Automation, or Integration. Assess your business maturity in Integrated Business Planning using our free online self-assessment tool .

Assess your business maturity

How you can benefit from Integrated Business Planning

Early identification of gaps in the business plan and strategy deployment, creating time to close them

An integrated view of performance and projection of your business over a 24-36 month horizon

Alignment of functional operating plans and financial projections with ‘one set of numbers’

Application of scenario planning and modelling to areas of your business where there may be uncertainty or impact

Increased responsiveness to uncertainties and unplanned events to minimize negative impacts and seize opportunities

Creation of transparency and clear accountability across the business/organization

Simplification of the budgeting or annual planning process

Integration of strategy deployment with operational plans

Increased employee engagement and efficiency

Growth in revenue

Reduced costs

Improved customer service

Reduced inventory

Visibility of planned product changes, future demand from sales and marketing, supply chain performance, planned supply chain capability and flexibility, plus bottom-up plans and the actions and decisions required to deliver ‘best for business' outcomes

You should consider Integrated Business Planning for your business if:

You are constantly in ‘fire-fighting’ mode

You have a misaligned management team

You are continually missing the financial plan

You are experiencing rapid growth and can no longer manage effectively using an informal process

Your budgeting process is ‘painful’

You are struggling to get on top of service issues

You cannot keep up with growth in demand

You have excessive inventory

You are experiencing excessive rework and cost

Departments or sites are working in silos

There is no ‘single source of truth’ or ‘single set of numbers’ to run the business

You feel like you never have time to look at the strategy

There is poor deployment and execution of the strategic plan

You have poor employee engagement

You feel like you are not getting a return on the effort put into your existing S&OP/IBP process

How we can help

A diagnostic assessment of your current S&OP or IBP process, including its effectiveness and identifying any performance issues

Transfer of our knowledge to your people so they can create and manage an effective IBP process

Change management – plan, monitor, and support the implementation of change and its impact on your people

Facilitate the design of an IBP process to best fit your organization and its needs

Scoping of an action plan to address issues and take advantage of the opportunities identified, including resourcing, timelines, and performance improvement expectations

Coach IBP process users as you introduce the new ways of working

Assess and validate that your IBP process has achieved a Class A level of effectiveness – firmly embedded as the ‘way you do things’ and delivering the benefits you wanted

Integrated Business Planning is a cutting edge process which creates cross-functional alignment and enables businesses to re-focus to meet the ever-changing environment. IBP generates readiness for alternative outcomes, enhances collaboration, and ultimately drives deployment of strategy in an uncertain world. The chosen process of some of the world’s most progressive and best-known organizations, IBP is a common-sense process that maximizes profit and enables leaders to manage risk with confidence.

Integrated business planning resources to help you improve.

White papers & case studies

Videos & webinars

Get in touch

Upcoming courses.

16 Apr 2024

Virtual (English)

Integrated Business Planning – Introduction, Overview, and Current Best Practice

More information +

11 Jun 2024

10 Sep 2024

08 Oct 2024

Virtual (French)

French Integrated Business Planning Workshop

12 Nov 2024

Latest white papers & case studies

Doom looms or opportunity awaits

Deploying Strategy with Integrated Business Planning

Assumptions Management Part 2: Structural Integrity

Navigating the decision: behavior, empowerment, and integration to support the information revolution

From complexity to simplicity: The power of aligning people, process, and technology

Assumptions Management Part 1: Controlling your future in an uncertain world

Five key factors to speed up your successful IBP journey: Intelligent solutions meet your integrated process.

Gehen Sie Fake News nicht auf den Leim.

Transformer son S&OP en IBP

Navigating Uncertainty: Is Your IBP Process Fit for the Future?

Scenario Planning Trigger Points – Creating an Integrated Response to Scenarios

Getting the Most From Integrated Business Planning

Latest books

The Transition from Sales and Operations Planning to Integrated Business Planning - Second Edition

The Oliver Wight Class A Standard for Business Excellence

Le Standard Classe A d’Oliver Wight pour l’Excellence en Entreprise

Der Class A Standard für Business Excellence nach Oliver Wight

El Estándar de Clase A para la Excelencia Empresarial de Oliver Wight

Orchestrating Success: Improve Control of the Business with Sales & Operations Planning

Enterprise Sales and Operations Planning

An Executive's Guide to Achieving Class A Business Excellence

Latest videos and webinars

Balancing planning (ibp) and execution (itp) in rapidly changing socioeconomic environments.

Flavio Pietrocola, Oliver Wight Partner, explains how to find the right balance between Planning (IBP) and Execution (ITP) in this disruptive and rapidly changing world.

How to steer a company through the D-VUCAD world? (in German)

This podcast episode discusses how to steer companies through volatile, unpredictable times and what modern control instruments and technologies there are that companies should use.

Managing Change through Effective Implementation of Integrated Business Planning

Oliver Wight Partner, Gary Connors explains the five common failure modes in implementing Integrated Business Planning and how to manage changes through IBP.

Moving to E2E Supply Chain Management with IBP coordination

Watch the video to see Oliver Wight's CEO Les Brookes explains how to drive End-to-End supply chain transformation with IBP.

Eminox Ltd: What was it like working with Oliver Wight?

Oliver Wight Partner, Dawn Dent spoke to Eminox's Managing Director Mark Runciman, who shares his experience of working with Oliver Wight.

The Digital Supply Chain podcast

Supply Chain Resilience with Integrated Business Planning - a chat with SAP and Oliver Wight.

IBP: Driving Growth, Increasing Productivity & Improving Customer Service

Oliver Wight’s Paul Ducie joins Olivehorse Consulting to discuss how to assess your organization’s maturity, and define the correct approach for implementation.

Dynamic Integrated Business Planning: aligning process and tools to meet the challenges of an everch

The right collaboration between process and tools can deliver the IBP promise efficiently and dynamically.

The Enemies of Effective Measures

Does your business truly understand measuring and analysis? Do you apply the data and learn from it? Or are there conflicting or biased measures happening behind the scenes?

What business leaders are talking about today

Oliver Wight's Andy Walker and EY's Jocelyn Hallum discuss what business leaders are talking about today.

Financial Planning with IBP: Creating one process for your business

Join Oliver Wight Partners Monte Maritz & Lucy Jacobs for this webinar in our ongoing series focused on the evolution of Integrated Business Planning.

Data accuracy in the healthcare industry

Oliver Wight Partners Gary Connors and Steve Rowntree lift the lid on why data accuracy (or inaccuracy) is so prevalent in the healthcare industry.

• Link copied

How embracing integrated business planning could fuel the future for CFOs

EY Canada Finance Consulting Leader

Enthusiastic transformation consultant. Voracious reader. Avid traveller. Involuntarily quotes lines from his favourite movies, triggering eyerolls from his wife and kids.

EY Canada Integrated Business Planning Leader

Finance transformation leader. Dynamic project manager. Consummate team player with a collaborative approach.

Show resources

Today’s market requires businesses to plan faster and assess multiple scenarios. integrated business planning can break down silos, unlocking more savings and growth..

• Did your organization lose out on key market and growth opportunities due to the abrupt market shifts brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic?
• Are your organization’s disconnected processes hindering finance’s ability to react quickly to changes or disruptions?
• Could technology help you identify the gaps that are impacting your organization’s ability to make better strategic decisions?

Spearheading a more integrated approach to business planning can help transition Canadian chief financial officers to chief value officers in a market that necessitates unprecedented agility. CFOs who embrace this moment to reframe their role can simultaneously generate long-term value for their organizations — and a more meaningful path forward for their teams, and themselves.

Why is integrated business planning critical?

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused abrupt market shifts that drive the need to plan faster and assess multiple scenarios. From supply chain breakdowns to a dynamic labour market to logistical nightmares: organizations that failed to plan quickly or flexibly enough have faltered over the last 18 months. As planning fell short, companies in all sectors lost out on key market opportunities, earnings and growth. In response, EY market research shows CFOs globally are now drilling down to lead or co-lead unprecedented investments — in both size and scale — in planning transformations. They’re smart to do so, in an environment further characterized by a collective redefining of long-term value.

Applying integrated business planning (IBP) is key to navigating this complex market and driving long-term financial health. Based on EY conducted market research relating to IBP, we know organizations that get IBP right can:

• Increase sales
• Reduce cash cycles
• Ramp up EBIT
• Improve forecast accuracy
• Cut down inventory

Canadian CFOs have a unique opportunity to hone a competitive advantage by similarly linking demand, supply, capital, labour and financial planning through IBP frameworks that foster agility. Doing so now can prepare the organization for potential market shocks, increase opportunities as we navigate the new normal, and position finance itself as a trusted advisor, indispensable in the process of defining and supporting strategic priorities in any economic climate.

How can CFOs spearhead integrated business planning?

IBP not only requires good process and enabling systems. It also needs a high degree of cooperation across functional silos that are often challenging to break down. Making IBP work requires strong leadership and vision. Value-driving CFOs are seizing the opportunity to provide the necessary leadership to make IBP work. They begin by asking three questions.

How EY can help

Integrated business planning.

Our Integrated Business Planning professionals can help your business connect what finance and the business are doing to unlock new routes to savings and growth. Find out how.

1. Are internal silos holding us back and slowing us down?

IBP should be a connected process, developed and shared by finance and operations. Done well, it positions finance as a strategic ally, aligning processes across multiple areas to create a sustainable, transparent and controlled method of planning ahead. Integrated business planning is about connecting what finance and the business are doing, so the organization can react more quickly to any number of external changes, shocks or disruptions. That collaborative approach accelerates speed to impact.

• Identify the operational silos that may be holding your integration back and begin systematically dismantling them to encourage a more integrated, cross-functional approach to business planning. But don’t bite off more than your organization can chew. The end goal of IBP can be accomplished using a modular approach – breaking down one silo at a time – rather than a costly and higher-risk “big bang” strategy.

2. Do technology gaps stop us from hitting our goals?

Better decision-making now depends on an organization’s ability to use data predictively. Tech-enabled platforms unify ways of working, thinking and operating so functional groups can make better decisions around strategic direction and tactical execution — together. The modular and scalable planning tools of today combined with machine learning, artificial intelligence and other accelerators can transform data collection and processing behind the scenes. This makes business planning more accurate and better connected to what’s happening in real time. That’s important for stakeholders seeking to understand the state of play or apply insight to buy smartly, invest wisely, manage effectively and save comprehensively. When you use technology to surface analytics and insight, teams can focus on results and be nimble when correcting course.

• Assess your tech platforms to understand where the gaps lie and create a plan to connect the tools you have with the additional solutions you’ll need to support a more integrated business planning framework.

3. Is our talent agenda out of date?

Top talent is seeking higher quality jobs that offer the attractiveness and potential for longer-term relationships that come with an overarching career experience. Compensation alone is not enough to recruit and retain the leaders finance will need to support a more strategic function that’s capable of catalyzing cross-functional collaboration and change in the organization. When you embrace IBP, you empower yourself with an instrumental new driver that allows you to rethink your future — and the future of your workforce. Putting humans at the centre of your strategy can unleash meaningful value over the long term.

• Set a clear vision for what it will mean to work in finance going forward, where you’d like the function to go and what changes you’ll need to make to cultivate a corporate culture that talent will actively pursue.

What’s the bottom line?

There’s no better time for CFOs to forge a new path forward through IBP in ways that create agility and value for their organizations. Doing so now can reposition finance as a forward-looking, strategic ally committed to spurring growth, scaling reach and developing value.

Business, markets, expectations and technology have all changed. These monumental shifts necessitate a new framework for business planning. Integrated business planning is a connected process that can position finance as a strategic ally, aligning processes across multiple areas to create a sustainable, transparent and controlled method of planning ahead.

About this article

Connect with us

Our locations

Legal and privacy

Accessibility

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.

EY | Assurance | Consulting | Strategy and Transactions | Tax

EY is a global leader in assurance, consulting, strategy and transactions, and tax services. The insights and quality services we deliver help build trust and confidence in the capital markets and in economies the world over. We develop outstanding leaders who team to deliver on our promises to all of our stakeholders. In so doing, we play a critical role in building a better working world for our people, for our clients and for our communities.

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients. For more information about our organization, please visit ey.com.

© EYGM Limited. All Rights Reserved. 

EYG/OC/FEA no.

This material has been prepared for general informational purposes only and is not intended to be relied upon as accounting, tax, or other professional advice. Please refer to your advisors for specific advice.

Welcome to EY.com

In addition to cookies that are strictly necessary to operate this website, we use the following types of cookies to improve your experience and our services: Functional cookies to enhance your experience (e.g. remember settings), and  Performance cookies to measure the website's performance and improve your experience . , and Marketing/Targeting cookies , which are set by third parties, allow us to execute marketing campaigns, manage our relationship with you, build a profile of your interests and provide you with content or service offerings in accordance with your preferences. 

We have detected that Do Not Track/Global Privacy Control is enabled in your browser; as a result, Marketing/Targeting cookies , which are set by third parties that allow us to execute marketing campaigns, manage our relationship with you, build a profile of your interests and provide you with content or service offerings in accordance with your preferences are automatically disabled.

You may withdraw your consent to cookies at any time once you have entered the website through a link in the privacy policy, which you can find at the bottom of each page on the website.

Review our  cookie policy  for more information.

Customize cookies

I decline optional cookies

Enabling integrated business planning through big data analytics: a case study on sales and operations planning

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to investigate how big data analytics capabilities (BDAC) enable the implementation of integrated business planning (IBP) – the advanced form of sales and operations planning (S&OP) – by counteracting the increasing information processing requirements.Design/methodology/approachThe research model is grounded in the organizational information processing theory (OIPT). An embedded single case study on a multinational agrochemical company with multiple geographically distinguished sub-units of analysis was conducted. Data were collected in workshops, semistructured interviews as well as direct observations and enriched by secondary data from internal company sources as well as publicly available sources.FindingsThe results show the relevancy of establishing BDAC within an organization to apply IBP by providing empirical evidence of BDA solutions in S&OP. The study highlights how BDAC increase an organization's information processing capacity and consequently enable efficient and effective S&OP. Practical guidance toward the development of tangible, human and intangible BDAC in a particular sequence is given.Originality/valueThis study is the first theoretically grounded, empirical investigation of S&OP implementation journeys under consideration of the impact of BDAC.

• Related Documents

An experimental investigation of the impact of using big data analytics on customers’ performance measurement

Purpose This study aims to investigate and explore the impact of big data analytics (BDA) as a mechanism that could develop the ability to measure customers’ performance. To accomplish the research aim, the theoretical discussion was developed through the combination of the diffusion of innovation theory with the technology acceptance model (TAM) that is less developed for the research field of this study. Design/methodology/approach Empirical data was obtained using Web-based quasi-experiments with 104 Egyptian accounting professionals. Further, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test and the chi-square goodness-of-fit test were used to analyze data. Findings The empirical results indicate that measuring customers’ performance based on BDA increase the organizations’ ability to analyze the customers’ unstructured data, decrease the cost of customers’ unstructured data analysis, increase the ability to handle the customers’ problems quickly, minimize the time spent to analyze the customers’ data and obtaining the customers’ performance reports and control managers’ bias when they measure customer satisfaction. The study findings supported the accounting professionals’ acceptance of BDA through the TAM elements: the intention to use (R), perceived usefulness (U) and the perceived ease of use (E). Research limitations/implications This study has several limitations that could be addressed in future research. First, this study focuses on customers’ performance measurement (CPM) only and ignores other performance measurements such as employees’ performance measurement and financial performance measurement. Future research can examine these areas. Second, this study conducts a Web-based experiment with Master of Business Administration students as a study’s participants, researchers could conduct a laboratory experiment and report if there are differences. Third, owing to the novelty of the topic, there was a lack of theoretical evidence in developing the study’s hypotheses. Practical implications This study succeeds to provide the much-needed empirical evidence for BDA positive impact in improving CPM efficiency through the proposed framework (i.e. CPM and BDA framework). Furthermore, this study contributes to the improvement of the performance measurement process, thus, the decision-making process with meaningful and proper insights through the capability of collecting and analyzing the customers’ unstructured data. On a practical level, the company could eventually use this study’s results and the new insights to make better decisions and develop its policies. Originality/value This study holds significance as it provides the much-needed empirical evidence for BDA positive impact in improving CPM efficiency. The study findings will contribute to the enhancement of the performance measurement process through the ability of gathering and analyzing the customers’ unstructured data.

The influence of big data analytics management capabilities on supply chain preparedness, alertness and agility

Purpose The importance of big data analytics (BDA) on the development of supply chain (SC) resilience is not clearly understood. To address this, the purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of BDA management capabilities, namely, BDA planning, BDA investment decision making, BDA coordination and BDA control on SC resilience dimensions, namely, SC preparedness, SC alertness and SC agility. Design/methodology/approach The study relied on perceptual measures to test the proposed associations. Using extant measures, the scales for all the constructs were contextualized based on expert feedback. Using online survey, 249 complete responses were collected and were analyzed using partial least squares in SmartPLS 2.0.M3. The study targeted professionals with sufficient experience in analytics in different industry sectors for survey participation. Findings Results indicate BDA planning, BDA coordination and BDA control are critical enablers of SC preparedness, SC alertness and SC agility. BDA investment decision making did not have any prominent influence on any of the SC resilience dimensions. Originality/value The study is important as it addresses the contribution of BDA capabilities on the development of SC resilience, an important gap in the extant literature.

The influence of the practices of big data analytics applications on bank performance: filed study

Purpose This paper aims to examine factors influencing the practices of big data analytics applications by commercial banks operating in Jordan and their bank performance. Design/methodology/approach A conceptual framework was developed in this regard based on a comprehensive literature review and the Technology–Environment–Organization (TOE) model. A quantitative approach was used, and the data was collected from 235 commercial banks’ senior and middle managers (IT, financial and marketers) using both online and paper-based questionnaires. Findings The results showed that the extent of the practices of big data analytics applications by commercial banks operating in Jordan is considered to be moderate (i.e. 60%). The results indicated that 61% of the variation on the practices of big data analytics applications by commercial banks could be predicated by TOE model. The organizational factors were found the most important predictors. The results also provide empirical evidence that the extent of practices of big data analytics applications has a positive influence on the bank performance. In the final section, research implications and future directions are presented. Originality/value This paper contributes to theory by filling a gap in the literature regarding the extent of the practices of big data analytics applications by commercial banks operating in developing countries, such as Jordan. It empirically examines the impact of the practices of big data analytics applications on bank performance.

Are environmental-related online reviews more helpful? A big data analytics approach

Purpose Based on more than 2.7 million online reviews (ORs) collected with big data analytical techniques from Booking.com and TripAdvisor.com, this paper aims to explore if and to what extent environmental discourse embedded in ORs has an impact on electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) helpfulness across eight major destination cities in North America and Europe. Design/methodology/approach This study gathered, by means of Big Data techniques, 2.7 million ORs hosted on Booking.com and TripAdvisor, and covering hospitality services in eight different destinations cities in North America (New York City, Miami, Orlando and Las Vegas) and Europe (Barcelona, London, Paris and Rome) over the period 2017–2018. The ORs were analysed by means of ad hoc content analytic dictionaries to identify the presence and depth of the environmental discourse included in each OR. A negative binomial regression analysis was used to measure the impact of the presence/depth of online environmental discourse in ORs on e-WOM helpfulness. Findings The findings indicate that the environmental discourse presence and depth influence positively e-WOM helpfulness. More specifically those travelers who write explicitly about environmental topics in their ORs are more likely to produce ORs that are voted as helpful by other consumers. Research limitations/implications Implications highlight that both hotel managers and platform developers/managers should become increasingly aware of the importance that customer attach to environmental practices and initiatives and therefore engage more assiduously in environmental initiatives, if their objective is to improve online review helpfulness for other customers reading the focal reviews. Future studies might include more destinations and other operationalizations of environmental discourse. Originality/value This study constitutes the first attempt to capture how the presence and depth of hospitality services consumers’ environmental discourse influence e-WOM helpfulness on multiple digital platforms, by means of a big data analysis on a large sample of online reviews across multiple countries and destinations. As such it makes a relevant contribution to the area at the intersection between big data analytics, e-WOM and sustainable tourism research.

Responding to market turbulence by big data analytics and mass customization capability

PurposeThis study aims to explore how to respond to market turbulence by big data analytics (BDA) capability and mass customization capability (MCC) from the perspective of organizational information processing theory (OIPT).Design/methodology/approachThis study examines the research hypotheses using hierarchical regression analysis by collecting data from 277 Chinese firms.FindingsThe results reveal that supply chain agility (SCA) completely mediates the impacts of technical skills on product-oriented and service-oriented MCC and the impact of data-driven decision-making culture (DDC) on service-oriented MCC. SCA also partially mediates the impacts of managerial skills on two dimensions of MCC and the impact of DDC on product-oriented MCC. In addition, market turbulence strengthens the impact of managerial skills on SCA.Originality/valueThis study provides insightful contributions and implications for enhancing MCC to cope with market turbulence.

Big data analytics in supply chain and logistics: an empirical approach

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to recognise the current state of big data analytics (BDA) on different organisational and supply chain management (SCM) levels in Brazilian firms. Specifically, the paper focuses on understanding BDA awareness in Brazilian firms and proposes a framework to analyse firms’ maturity in implementing BDA projects in logistics/SCM. Design/methodology/approach A survey on SCM levels of 1,000 firms was conducted via questionnaires. Of the 272 questionnaires received, 155 were considered valid, representing a 15.5 per cent response rate. Findings The knowledge of Brazilian firms regarding BDA, the difficulties and barriers to BDA project adoption, and the relationship between supply chain levels and BDA knowledge were identified. A framework was proposed for the adoption of BDA projects in SCM. Research limitations/implications This study does not offer external validity due to restrictions for the generalisation of the results even in the Brazilian context, which stems from the conducted sampling. Future studies should improve the comprehension in this research field and focus on the impact of big data on supply chains or networks in emerging world regions, such as Latin America. Practical implications This paper provides insights for practitioners to develop activities involving big data and SCM, and proposes functional and consistent guidance through the BDA-SCM triangle framework as an additional tool in the implementation of BDA projects in the SCM context. Originality/value This study is the first to analyse BDA on different organisational and SCM levels in emerging countries, offering instrumentalisation for BDA-SCM projects.

Does big data analytics influence frontline employees in services marketing?

Purpose Big data analytics (BDA) helps service providers with customer insights and competitive information. It also empowers customers with insights about the relative merits of competing services. The purpose of this paper is to address the research question, “How does big data analytics enable frontline employees (FLEs) in effective service delivery?” Design/methodology/approach The research develops schemas to visualise service contexts that potentially benefit from BDA, based on the literature drawn from BDA and FLEs streams. Findings The business drivers for BDA and its level of maturity vary across firms. The primary thrust for BDA is to gain customer insights, resource optimisation and efficient operations. Innovative FLEs operating in knowledge intensive and customisable settings may realise greater value co-creation. Practical implications There exists a considerable knowledge gap in enabling the FLEs with BDA tools. Managers need to train, orient and empower FLEs to collaborate and create value with customer interactions. Service-dominant logic posits that skill asymmetry is the reason for service. So, providers need to enhance skill levels of FLEs continually. Providers also need to focus on market sensing and customer linking abilities of FLEs. Social implications Both firms and customers need to be aware of privacy and ethical concerns associated with BDA. Originality/value Knitting the BDA and FLEs research streams, the paper analyses the impact of BDA on service. The research by developing service typology portrays its interplay with the typologies of FLEs and BDA. The framework portrays the service contexts in which BD has major impact. Looking further into the future, the discussion raises prominent questions for the discipline.

What attracts vehicle consumers’ buying

Purpose The increasingly booming e-commerce development has stimulated vehicle consumers to express individual reviews through online forum. The purpose of this paper is to probe into the vehicle consumer consumption behavior and make recommendations for potential consumers from textual comments viewpoint. Design/methodology/approach A big data analytic-based approach is designed to discover vehicle consumer consumption behavior from online perspective. To reduce subjectivity of expert-based approaches, a parallel Naïve Bayes approach is designed to analyze the sentiment analysis, and the Saaty scale-based (SSC) scoring rule is employed to obtain specific sentimental value of attribute class, contributing to the multi-grade sentiment classification. To achieve the intelligent recommendation for potential vehicle customers, a novel SSC-VIKOR approach is developed to prioritize vehicle brand candidates from a big data analytical viewpoint. Findings The big data analytics argue that “cost-effectiveness” characteristic is the most important factor that vehicle consumers care, and the data mining results enable automakers to better understand consumer consumption behavior. Research limitations/implications The case study illustrates the effectiveness of the integrated method, contributing to much more precise operations management on marketing strategy, quality improvement and intelligent recommendation. Originality/value Researches of consumer consumption behavior are usually based on survey-based methods, and mostly previous studies about comments analysis focus on binary analysis. The hybrid SSC-VIKOR approach is developed to fill the gap from the big data perspective.

The impact of Industry 4.0 on organizational performance: the case of Pakistan's retail industry

PurposeThe purpose of this paper was to assess and determine the impact of the five core technologies of Industry 4.0 (3D Printing, Big Data Analytics, Cloud Computing, Internet of Things (IoT) and Robotics) on the organizational performance of the retail industry in the context of Pakistan.Design/methodology/approachPakistan's retail industry was chosen as the target sector, and the target population was composed of senior-level employees, including managers from first-level positions to top-level positions, as well as subordinate employees working under the supervision of first-level managers, possessing the technological know-how of Industry 4.0. The data were collected through a matrix-based survey questionnaire that was based on a five-point Likert scale, ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” The process of data analysis was conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics.FindingsThe findings obtained by this research work showed a significant relationship among the five core pillars of Industry 4.0 and the organizational performance of Pakistan's retail industry. Besides, the obtained findings provided preliminary evidence that Industry 4.0's disruptive technologies, particularly, 3D printing, big data analytics, cloud computing, IoT and robotics, could help Pakistan's retail industry solve various problems and challenges, such as meager revenues, increased expenses and unorganized systems.Originality/valueThe present study extended the theoretical body of knowledge through studying and examining Industry 4.0's five crucial factors that significantly contribute to the service sector, particularly, the retail industry, of the big emerging markets (BEM) economies, including Pakistan.

The framework of talent analytics using big data

PurposeThe era of work 4.0 demands organizations to expedite their digital transformation to sustain their competitive advantage in the market. This paper aims to help the human resource (HR) department digitize and automate their analytical processes based on a big-data-analytics framework.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology applied in this paper is based on a case study and experimental analysis. The research was conducted in a specific industry and focused on solving talent analysis problems.FindingsThis research conducts digital talent analysis using data mining tools with big data. The talent analysis based on the proposed framework for developing and transforming the HR department is readily implementable. The results obtained from this talent analysis using the big-data-analytics framework offer many opportunities in growing and advancing a company's talents that are not yet realized.Practical implicationsBig data allows HR to perform analysis and predictions, making more intelligent and accurate decisions. The application of big data analytics in an HR department has a significant impact on talent management.Originality/valueThis research contributes to the literature by proposing a formal big-data-analytics framework for HR and demonstrating its applicability with real-world case analysis. The findings help organizations develop a talent analytics function to solve future leaders' business challenges.

Export Citation Format

Share document.

• Manufacturing Trends
• Supply Chain
• Customer Success

Winning the Business Case for Integrated Business Planning

There are obvious benefits to implementing Integrated Business Planning but many organisations still continue to work in traditional silos and firefight their way through as it is perceived as too costly and difficult to change. But is doing nothing a really sensible option ?

Doing Nothing is Expensive

Doing nothing and maintaining the status quo is always the easy option. Being able to firefight and be a supply-chain hero is actually quite satisfying. You get to solve problems every day, working frantically to push urgent orders out of the door to meet your customer deadlines and get congratulated on a job well done. But is this really the best way to work? What is it actually costing you to continue to work this way?

The argument for doing nothing is that you can’t afford to change. Change costs money in terms of people, processes and systems to support it. But have you considered what your current ways of working are actually costing you? There is a cost of delay when you do nothing. Every month that you continue to work in the same old way means you are spending money unnecessarily. How much will you have wasted in the next 4 quarters?

Integrated Business Planning to Save Money

Here I cover several areas where Integrated Business Planning improves the bottom line.

Optimizing Inventory

All manufacturing & distribution businesses carry inventory in order to meet demand within the customer lead time. That inventory could be in finished goods, work-in-progress, components or raw materials. The major driver of inventory is to hedge against uncertainty in the supply chain . Sales want everything in stock so they increase their forecasts. Supply chain are measured on service level so they increase the safety stock. Production want the line to keep running so they stock more components. The uncertainty is a result of not having a single agreed plan in the business and everyone has their own forecasts and view of what demand will be. The result is sometimes called the bullwhip effect as inventory levels are driven up at every level of the supply chain.

A conservative estimate for inventory carrying cost is around 20% per annum. So for a company holding £10M of inventory this will be costing them £2M a year. If they were to continue ‘as is’ with their existing way of working and maintain this inventory then some would say this has cost them nothing. However, if they were to implement a proper IBP process and were able to reduce their inventory by just 10% to £18M, there would be a bottom line saving in the inventory carrying cost from £2M to £1.8M a year. So another way of looking at this situation is if they continue with their current way of working the cost of delay is £200K a year.

Delivering On Time In Full

Every company strives for maximum ‘on time in full’ (OTIF) delivery to their customer but inevitably there are occasions this is not always achieved. When orders are not fulfilled the revenue is lost and in some cases may not be recovered. Furthermore, the customer may levy a fine for late or missing items so there is a double penalty of the lost revenue and the imposed fine. For example in August 2017 Walmart published new stricter penalties for their suppliers that mean a fine of 3% of the total invoice value for missing and late items.

IBP enables organisations to meet those customer deadlines without all the stress and at the same time actually improve profitability. By optimizing the level of inventory within the supply chain, IBP improves OTIF performance which in turn improves the order-to-cash cycle and avoids fines from the customer.

Research by the Aberdeen Group in April 2016* showed that organisations utilizing Integrated Business Planning had a customer service level improvement of 4.3% and an order-to-cash cycle reduction of 15 days compared to those companies who were not using IBP.

Reducing Operational Costs

Increasing revenue through improved OTIF is a worthy objective. However accountants have a saying “turnover is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is reality”. Managing operational cost is a key driver to ensure the organisation makes a profit and can continue to invest and grow the business.

Supply chains that are performing sub-optimally have higher operational costs. To try and meet OTIF targets when materials and finished goods are unavailable results in expediting activities such as paying for premium freight and paying a higher price for locally sourced materials on shorter lead times. For manufacturing companies, trying to meet urgent demand means having to interrupt production plans and run smaller batches which causes more frequent and costly changeovers and increases the manufacturing cost per unit.

Through Integrated Business Planning, organisations have visibility of an agreed, robust plan which in turn drives the correct decisions in terms of inventory and production plans. Requirements to expedite materials and interrupt the production plan are minimized as the correct decisions have been made based on sound assumptions as opposed to wishful thinking.

Improving Financial Visibility

Knowing when cash will be available allows the organisation to plan activities that can drive revenue and reduce cost. For example it can fund trade activity such as promotions that can take market share from competitors. Alternatively it can allow suppliers to be paid earlier and in turn receive a discount on the invoice price, thus reducing costs and increasing profit.

This is only possible when there is a realistic view of demand and supply that has been translated into a cash-flow forecast using accounts receivable and payable information (ie. when you expect to be paid by customers for deliveries and when you have to pay suppliers for materials). An effective IBP process provides a cash-flow forecast that enables the organisation to plan ahead and take advantage of such opportunities.

The Aberdeen Group research referred to earlier showed that 76% of organisations with IBP were able to evaluate and optimise inventory & service policy to maximise cash-flow and profitability. This compared to only 26% of organisations without IBP.

There are many advantages of implementing Integrated Business Planning in terms of improved customer service, optimizing inventory levels, purchasing and production plan stability and ultimately the growth of revenue and profit. By moving away from working in silos and fire-fighting out of trouble, the organisation is working on a single, agreed plan that meets the operational and financial objectives of the business

*  Integrated Business Planning (IBP) : Capability Advantage for IBP Users vs. Non users , Bryan Ball, April 2016

RELATED ARTICLES MORE FROM AUTHOR

Key Ingredients to a Synchronized Food and Beverage Supply Chain

Imports: How AI Simplifies Product Classification

UFLPA: Non-Compliance is Not an Option

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

The New Equation

Executive leadership hub - What’s important to the C-suite?

Tech Effect

Shared success benefits

Loading Results

No Match Found

Transform your business performance management with PwC via integrated Anaplan solutions

Leveraging The New Equation

As a global collaborator of Anaplan, we bring transformational knowledge and the power of enterprise business planning to our clients.

With Anaplan we connect your people, plans and data. Our multidisciplinary advisory team with knowledge in customer, finance, workforce and operational transformation, brings a thorough and integrated approach to your business performance management. By considering both business and technical aspects, our team can help to improve the dynamic, collaborative and intelligent nature of your business performance management experience.

What does connected insights and performance management mean in today’s business landscape?

With Anaplan, PwC can help enable your organization to run virtually any performance management and insight generation process by connecting data, people and plans in every part of a business.

“We view the collaboration with PwC as an opportunity to help deliver business value to our customers. By teaming with PwC, we’re setting the stage for these organizations to achieve transformative value. We’re confident that with its strategy and digital knowledge in helping deliver valuable and high impact solutions, PwC will deliver successful outcomes for our customers.” Carla Moradi, SVP GPAO, Anaplan

Find the solution that best suits your business needs

Explore our solutions that help you solve your most pressing business challenges and further increase the capabilities of your existing Anaplan implementation.

Customer transformation

Finance transformation, workforce transformation, operations transformation.

Account segmentation and capacity planning

Reimagination of industry leading segmentation process by (1) leveraging historical data to make informed decisions to standardize and balance segmentation selections globally, (2) building workflows that span countries, geographies, regional and worldwide teams, and (3) increasing business intelligence by synchronizing data between all process areas and creating persona based KPI dashboards to inform strategic planning decisions.

Territory and quota planning and management (TQM)

Best in class territory and quota management by (1) building advanced territory model applications to create balanced territories that inform sales planning decisions, (2) automating translation rules from Finance to Sales to initiate the quota deployment process, and (3) using system-assisted quota deployment across all levels of a sales hierarchy to reduce the number of adjustments planners need to make each cycle.

Streamlined incentive compensation management (ICM)

Industry leading ICM by covering key capabilities ranging from payee administration, plan design and release, source data transformation and loading, sales crediting / commission calculations, payroll and downstream reporting / analytics.

Pre deal and post deal analytics

Integrated process to help commercial and analytics teams assess deals by leveraging advanced analytics and modeling to create a 360-degree view of the customer and deal and monitor contract performance on-demand to help identify under-performing accounts and intervene during the contract before its too late to course correct.

Enterprise integrated business planning

Cross-functional, cross-disciplinary enterprise performance management that enables agile and connected “Plan, Do, Check and Act”, across sales, marketing, supply chain operations, business units, R&D, infrastructure, HR and other back office functions, through shared drivers and smart insights integration, delivering financial results, speed and efficiency.

Integration with advanced finance analytics

Take advantage of the best of both worlds, where a hyperscale cloud computing platform of your choice is integrated into Anaplan to further expand data transformation, AI/ML forecasting, scenario analysis, natural language processing and generation, insights visualization, and storage.

Savings tracking analytics reporting tool

Integrated enterprise-wide cost savings initiatives set-up, tracking, monitoring, benchmarking (PwC Benchmark and Saratoga), analytics and reporting that helps drive visibility and accountability and also links savings plans, forecasts and results into business-as-usual annual, quarterly and monthly enterprise performance management cycles, in order to support enterprise wide cost transformation initiatives such as Fit for Growth .

Gross-to-net top line modeling, analytics and forecasting solution

Plug, tailor and play solution that harmonizes, enhances and integrates gross-to-net processes from forecasting and advanced pricing to revenue recognition and financial close, increasing insights through real-time calculations and scenario modeling, enhancing accuracy through advanced modeling (AI/ML, statistical models) and accelerating close and process speed through automation and data integration.

Enterprise wide environmental, social and governance (ESG)

End-to-end collaborative planning, tracking and reporting solution that helps establish greenhouse gas and emission targets, links internal and external data sources, accumulates environmental impacts from operations, tracks results to targets and objectives, generates insights and actions based on scenario modeling and facilitates compliance reporting.

Value added strategic workforce planning

Aligning an organization's business strategy with its workforce strategy, considering both short-term and long-term business goals and the underlying workforce and talent implications. Assess existing skills and capabilities, determine future skill and capability needs, evaluate gaps and develop plans to help address the gaps. Assess costs of build / buy / borrow investments, evaluate succession risks and mitigations, analyze workforce trends, model market scenarios and plan for changes proactively. Establish bi-directional integrations with HR systems and workflows to enable downstream processes.

Integrated headcount and labor cost planning

Enabling integrated views of budgets, headcount and labor costs trends and comparisons of period over period outputs. Perform real-time variance analysis across periods of actuals to forecast and annual budgets. Establish a single source of truth for financial and workforce data (e.g., salaries, location, function, role, level, cost center) that enables dimensionalized views across department, function, region, or other breakouts, while retaining centralized standards and governance. Establish bi-directional integration with HR systems and workflows to enable downstream processes.

Agile compensation planning

Set up bonus and incentive programs, create personalized compensation plans for individual employees, design and manage rewards structures, help facilitate annual year end comp planning processes, enable better compensation budget management. Model and simulate different compensation scenarios (e.g., overnight roll ups, market or workforce changes). Establish bi-directional integrations with HR systems and workflows to enable downstream processes.

Sales force effectiveness planning

Defining sales roles to enable alignment with customer segment requirements; finding the optimal way to deploy the sales force, helping confirm you have the right salespeople, with the right skills, in the right roles with our customized job architecture and career frameworks. We assess the most effective roles for current and potential talent, help set competitive pay levels and support that talent by identifying critical skills needed for success. We help design the KPIs and premium systems in line with strategic and financial targets and determine the right rewards to engage and motivate your sales force. Establish bi-directional integrations with HR systems and workflows to enable downstream processes.

Diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) planning

Assess current representation and historical trends of women and diverse populations, facilitate setting and tracking of diverse representation goals across various dimensions, assess impacts of location and workforce strategy on diverse representation and develop future projections of diverse representation for future scenarios. Establish bi-directional integrations with HR systems and workflows to enable downstream processes.

Enhanced demand planning and forecasting

Effective statistical algorithms and enriched predictions upon moment's notice with most up to date information whenever market volatility strikes. The business users benefit from the insights into both unconstrained forecast — indicating the market opportunity / base case sales scenario and also constrained forecast — which accounts for the bottlenecks and limitations of organizations' supply chain.

Dynamic supply planning

Dynamic supply planning solutions facilitate agile point in time decision-making by providing E2E visibility and real time insights into the supply chain. The organization can plan their production, capacity and sourcing activities dynamically, root cause any potential execution issues and perform what-if analysis to find the most effective resolution.

Inventory and supply network optimization and transformation

The platform is transformative in helping businesses meet global demand quickly and profitably. Advanced integrated solution algorithms take into account multiple variables and constraints in order to reduce inventory holding / transportation / production costs while improving customer service level.

Strategic and tactical sales and operations planning (S&OP)

S&OP solution facilitates the strategic and tactical levels of supply and demand planning by supporting the monthly integrated business management process. Integrated business planning helps the business leaders to focus on key supply chain drivers, analyze scenarios, translate them into financials and reach consensus integrated business plans across various functions.

Enhanced supplier collaboration

Enhanced collaboration between the businesses and their suppliers by sharing real- time information (lead times, material availability and pricing etc) and enabling joint planning and delivery activities. Some of the business benefits include increased process efficiency for sourcing and procurement teams, full spend visibility and savings from joint value creation.

PwC has worked with companies around the world on their business planning and enterprise performance management transformations via PwC differentiated, integrated Anaplan solutions.

Here are a few examples of how we’ve helped..

Global sales performance management solution

Challenges:

• General lack of central governance across geographies and business units, due to internal investments and acquisitions that were not integrated well
• Proliferation of disconnected offline tools, due to insufficient planning capabilities and process standardization
• Consistently late delivery of sales letters, due to lengthy sales planning processes and inefficiencies

Transformation:

Across segmentation, territory planning, sales force sizing, comp plan creation, account assignment and quota deployment, PwC led design and deployment of a holistic solution that entailed the following:

• Global standard process, across all geographies and business units
• Simplified compensation metrics structure, reducing metric library by 50% and setting the foundation for efficient automation
• User enabled and empowered territory planning, enabling balanced territory planning process, using account and market attributes
• Streamlined go-to-market and compensation driver framework, driving efficiency, while maintaining focus on strategic initiatives
• Linkage to finance, incentive compensation management system, and other critical systems further easing the upstream and downstream dependency bottlenecks
• A single central platform for all business units in target geographies, driving speed, transparency and end to end automation and reducing the annual sales planning cycle time by one full month
• Improved precision and accuracy through mitigated risk of human mistakes from enabling error trapping logic, improved data integrity by higher quality data feeds, and enhanced tactical coverage modeling using custom rule-based profiles
• Enhanced user experience by bringing peripheral users into tool that otherwise would be disconnected through manual processes and improved system performance by core platform reconstruction
• Precision in territory modeling and quota deployment against finance targets

Integrated performance management and enterprise business planning solution

• Manually intensive planning processes, due to disjointed systems and data
• Lack of confidence in providing external guidance, based on correct business driver assumptions
• Inability to drive business accountability into monthly results and monitor interim results for early warning signs and actions.
• Competitive market pressure on margin and consistent need to manage costs
• A new strategic direction to help enable product and business unit based segment reporting

Across finance, sales, supply chain operations, HR and R&D, the company and PwC designed and deployed a holistic enterprise performance management solution made up of Anaplan and other best of breed applications:

• Expanded ERP, consolidation and planning integration architecture, optimizing and automating data flow, granularity and frequency
• Dynamic, visualized, self-serve product based segment reporting, incorporating both historical and forward looking financial data
• Integration of S&OP, demand and other operational drivers into average sales price forecasting, P&L forecasting and cash liquidity forecasting
• Workforce data lineage across R&D planning, headcount planning, operating expense planning
• Master data management solution, synchronizing financial master data across general ledger, financial consolidation and planning applications
• Constant currency reporting, for both historical and forward looking financials
• Harmonized corporate cost allocations, between historical and forward looking financials

A real time, dynamic, collaborative, cross functional enterprise performance management solution suite

• Timely visibility into financial results and insights at the right level of details, resulting in enhanced business accountability, driving the right business discussions and actions, and thereby improving business managers’ ability to proactively manage and deliver their quarterly earnings targets
• Reduced monthly financial close and planning cycle time

Enterprise transformation and cost savings management solution

• Lengthy, manually intensive efforts, just to gather basic data and report on the savings plans and results
• Recurring disputes and confusion on versions of cost baseline, savings plans and savings results; difficulties in tracking costs-to-achieve
• Inability to monitor savings leakages and determine the state of the overall cost reduction program, in order to make informed and prioritized decisions on savings initiative proposals

Across Transformation Management Office (“TMO”, made up of a number of cost savings workstreams), HR and finance, the company and PwC designed and deployed a savings setting, tracking, monitoring, analytics and reporting solution:

• Automated on-line review and workflow, for savings target and cost-to-achieve proposals
• Standardized TMO action plan templates, to capture detailed near term savings action plans and costs-to-achieve from the TMO initiative owners
• Recurring data integration and systematic mechanism, to assess detailed actions against the actual historical general ledger and HR data
• Single source of truth for aggregating the cost baseline, multi year quarterly savings plan, detail short-term action plans and actual savings results, and costs incurred, by TMO workstreams
• Workforce data review and validation processes to help establish consistent governance and standards of workforce data
• Human resources information system and applicant tracking system configuration to enable the capture of required workforce data elements in a systematic and standardized way
• Online, self-serve, dynamic reports, that accumulates longer term plan, short term actions, actual results and gaps, including drill down capabilities
• Data outputs for integration into annual, quarterly and monthly enterprise performance management cycle
• Fundamental shift in TMO discussion from data quality and reconciliation to savings process and addressing savings gaps
• Enhanced auditability for external disclosure and reporting
• Ability to make initial and revisit ROI based decisions on individual savings initiatives
• Reduced overhead for supporting E2E TMO value chain reporting processes
• Reduction in monthly TMO reporting cycle time

Gross to net forecasting and accrual management

• Lengthy, manually intensive efforts, just to gather basic data and create accruals and forecasts
• Extended close timelines with limited data and analytics capabilities, with limited transparency, to determine a reliable net sales number
• Inconsistent and manual controls supporting the end-to-end forecasting and accrual process

With finance, accounting, the controllership and technology, the company and PwC designed and deployed an accrual management solution:

• Automation of key datasets from multiple internal source datasets at a granular level to drive transparency
• Automation of outbound journal entry postings to ERP
• Recurring data integration and systematic mechanism, to assess source data against the actual historical general ledger
• Single source of truth, for developing accruals and true-ups across multiple channels as well as supporting mid-range and long-range forecasting
• Embedded controls to support SOX compliance within the solution
• Developed scenario based forecasting with flexibility to adjust and compare forecasts
• Embedded advanced forecasting techniques by leveraging statistical modeling throughout the forecast process
• Harmonized accrual models across multiple channels and therapeutic areas
• Online, self-serve, dynamic reports, that leverages transactional data and modeling results to provide real-time updates based on current period modeling and analytics
• Enhanced GTN process by providing greater transparency and insights into plan vs. actuals and other standardized reporting and analytics
• Increased data quality and integrity, including aligning on a set of controls to maintain traceability and SOX compliance
• Automated and integrated GTN solution across accruals and forecasting to support close acceleration
• Increased forecasting and accruals accuracy through improved data quality and integrated modeling
• Ability to model assumptions at enhanced level of granularity to help facilitate improved transparency and insights into plan vs. actual
• Increased time spent on analytics across the gross-to-net forecasting process
• Accelerated close timelines by reducing manual work and leveraging automation

Sales and operations planning (S&OP)

• Lack of digital capabilities to model strategic supply chain options and its financial outcomes which drive profitable growth
• Gap between strategy and operations due to lack of collaborative sales and operations planning solution to drive strategic modeling and reconciliation processes

Across sales and operations planning, the company and PwC designed and deployed a holistic business planning solution that entailed the following:

• Demand planning and bottom-up integration - defined statistical forecast at consumer and wholesaler level to improve forecast accuracy; incorporated business knowledge around stock-out, supplier cap, marketing, and performed what-if analysis on volumes to gauge multiple scenarios and its impact; calculated impact of out-of-stock and method to allocate volumes to customer groups
• Supply planning - performed replenishment planning based on calculated needs, automatic calculation of safety stock check and what-if simulation on inventory parameters; evaluated forecasted inventory level and inventory transfers between warehouses
• Supply chain integration - performed Logistics and Inventory budgeting for efficient operations planning; assessed the impact of supply shortages through simulations; identified slow moving/obsolete inventory
• Integrated S&OP planning and financial planning with strong system capability enabling financial impact driven decision making
• Optimized S&OP process like bottom-up demand review and financial reconciliation reviews
• Fully integrated business planning processes connected with financial planning
• Migration of SC planning from legacy planning solution to Anaplan and integration with bottom-up financial flow
• Development of integrated bottom-up planning platform in Anaplan

{{filterContent.facetedTitle}}

{{item.publishDate}}

{{item.title}}

{{item.text}}

Explore further

Pricing & Sales Transformation, Partner, PwC US

Anaplan Transformation Leader, PwC US

Anaplan Alliance Director, PwC US

Thank you for your interest in PwC

We have received your information. Should you need to refer back to this submission in the future, please use reference number "refID" .

Required fields are marked with an asterisk( * )

Please correct the errors and send your information again.

By submitting your email address, you acknowledge that you have read the Privacy Statement and that you consent to our processing data in accordance with the Privacy Statement (including international transfers). If you change your mind at any time about wishing to receive the information from us, you can send us an email message using the Contact Us page.

© 2017 - 2024 PwC. All rights reserved. PwC refers to the PwC network and/or one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity. Please see www.pwc.com/structure for further details.

• Data Privacy Framework
• Cookie info
• Terms and conditions
• Site provider
• Your Privacy Choices

• Sections Co-Written / Partner E-commerce Fashion Stores Suppliers Technology
• Events Retail Asia Forum - Bangkok - April 25, 2024 Retail Asia Forum - Jakarta - May 16, 2024 Retail Asia Forum - Kuala Lumpur - June 27, 2024 Retail Asia Forum - Manila - October 3, 2024 Retail Asia Summit - November 20, 2024
• Advertising Advertising Digital Events

Case Study - Integrated Business Planning at Puma

A transformative journey from target setting to execution

Connect Now

Other articles, analyst report - barc – the future of planning, whitepaper - how advanced business intelligence illuminates retail planning, now and in the future, whitepaper - 4 steps to achieving long-term sales growth with spm, ebook - cfo - controllers choose now, ebook - 6 key hr trends and how technology can help you keep pace, case study - integrated retail planning at slowear, demo - merchandise financial planning, assortment planning, replenishment in fashion retail, demo - the control tower for grocery, factsheet - restaurant and fast food chains: analyze, simulate, plan and forecast, blog post - “land and expand” for retail strategy development, blog post - why retailers need to fall in love with demand planning, blog post - retail in the face of adversity: a step change is needed, blog post - visibility through data: a solution for supply chain, webinar - harnessing agility in a changed world: a retailer's journey to adapt, evolve and emerge, webinar - microsoft & board: better together – crm, sales planning and sales performance management, webinar - fp&a board maturity model: best-in-class fp&a & how to get there, whitepaper - the pioneering cfo: spearheading smarter decision-making, ebook - the beating heart of digital transformation: results of a new retailwire industry study, analyst report - ventana research - sales performance management is key to sales team success, case study - unified consolidation, analysis and reporting at imaginex, case study - transforming decision making at la perla by linking planning & analytics, demo - predictive forecasting & wholesale planning in fashion retail, blog post - why is integrated retail planning the future of retail tech, blog post - fail fast to survive in a turbulent retail market, blog post - how can integrated business planning transform your supply chain, factsheet - a new path to fashion retail planning, factsheet - reframing grocery retail planning and analytics, webinar - predictive forecasting and wholesale planning in fashion & luxury retail, webinar - driving end-to-end supply chain transformation with ibp, webinar - transforming the finance function: learn from fellow leaders, analyst report - barc data culture survey 22, brochure - board integrated business planning, whitepaper - the digital transformation of retail financial planning is underway, ebook - 6 ways to drive digital transformation in grocery retail, case study - operations planning transformation at kfc, case study - board & imaginex - towards automation & transformation, demo - store appraisal, blog post - five takeaways from retailwire’s 2021 planning & analytics study, blog post - remembering the fundamentals of retail technology to overcome today’s challenges, blog post - making your supply chain more sustainable, webinar - perfecting the recipe: integrated business planning for food & beverage businesses, demo - workforce planning & analytics, ebook - five key fp&a trends evolving the office of finance in 2022, blog post - five signposts that point the way to digitally transforming retail operations, blog post - grocery data analytics and planning: ensuring availability and maximizing performance, blog post - board: federating the c-levels for a true integrated retail planning approach, demo - planning & analytics for restaurant chains, demo - integrated retail planning for fashion, webinar - how h&m took workforce planning to the next level with board, brochure - retail merchandise planning with board, whitepaper - fp&a board maturity model, ebook - top supply chain trends to watch out for in 2022, analyst report - idc retail digital transformation - why integrated business planning is the linchpin, ebook - 5 key ways fashion and luxury retailers can plan for the unpredictable, whitepaper - why the time is now for integrated business planning in retail, infographic - the current state of retail planning and analytics adoption.

• Case studies

Board allows us to consolidate in a split-second. Yes, consolidation can happen for 48 manufacturing plants and 85 warehouses with one click!

We needed a planning system which integrates all planning processes. We needed a future-oriented planning system. We needed Board.

I use Board on a regular basis to see how we are tracking against our forecast and our budget and use that data to make decisions about resource planning, upcoming projects, and advertising focus for the coming year.

Intelligent Planning Success Stories from Board Customers

Integrated Corporate Planning at Coca-Cola European Partners

• Read the case study

Digital Finance Transformation at KPMG Germany

Streamlined sales and promotion planning at GSK Consumer Healthcare Italy

Integrated Financial and Operational Planning at Hapag-Lloyd

Intelligent Planning at Volkswagen Mexico

Operations Planning Transformation at KFC UK

Consolidated and automated processes across sales, operations, and HR save time and increase efficiency at Naim Holdings Berhad

Resource Management & Cost Analysis at MLB Network

Procurement Planning Transformation at Acea

Marketing Planning and Analysis at Mega Lifesciences

Enterprise Performance Management at Groupe SEB

Moving to EPM and reporting excellence at Å Energi Group

Unified Planning, Forecasting, Analysis, and Reporting at Euronics

Cross-departmental transformation at T&S Brass and Bronze

Unified S&OP, Cost Planning, and Sales Analysis at Syngenta

Integrated Sales & Operations Planning at KUKA

Financial Reporting and Forecasting Transformation at Odido (formerly T-Mobile)

Commercial Budgeting, Management Control, and Segment Reporting at Banco BPM

Automating the Office of Finance at Laerdal

Pan-European Planning and Reporting at Toyota Motor Europe

Intelligent Planning at Mitsubishi Electric

Enhancing FP&A and financial consolidation at Queensland Airports Limited

Want to see Board in action?

Request a demo.

Avelo Airlines continues to soar with PayPal’s strategic solutions

PayPal Editorial Staff

April 8, 2024

On April 28, 2021, Avelo Airlines took flight for the first time — ushering in a new era of convenient, affordable, and reliable air travel. 1 Their mission statement is to “inspire travel” and they accomplish this by reducing as much friction as possible for their customers. Avelo never charges a cancellation or change fee. Ever.

They serve over 48 destinations across the United States with an average ticket price of $100. Flying out of smaller, more convenient airports, saves their customers time and money so that they can fly easily and more often.

We spoke to Avelo’s Head of Finance and CFO Hunter Keay, and Chief Digital Officer, Sumit Goyal, to discuss their experience with PayPal Braintree, Pay Later, and Fraud Protection Advanced.

Success metrics

• 3% increase in approval rates. 3
• 22% higher AOV with Pay Later. 4
• 15.5% reduction in chargebacks. 5

The opportunity – Avelo wanted to simplify and streamline the checkout process to reduce friction for their customers.

Creating a seamless travel experience is paramount for Avelo Airlines. However, they encountered challenges with their prior processor and felt that they were not being heard. As a result, Avelo decided to explore other processing solutions, via a request for proposal (RFP). Their goal was to align with an innovative company that shared their vision for putting the customer first and minimizing friction. Avelo also wanted to offer their customers flexible payment options to help them easily budget their travel. And, to ensure that they were approving as many customers as possible, they wanted an adaptive machine-learning solution, to help protect them against evolving fraud. Innovation, reliability, scalability, and responsiveness were key factors in their decision-making process. Ultimately, Avelo Airlines chose PayPal.

Said Keay regarding the RFP process, “We spoke to a lot of really, good emerging fintech companies who provided compelling economics and value propositions. But PayPal was really the only one from a top to bottom perspective, from IT, economics, overall support, and collaboration. PayPal differentiated itself from the start.”

The solution – Avelo integrated PayPal Braintree’s platform to elevate their offerings and decrease turbulence.

With the integration of PayPal Braintree as their processor, Avelo has access to PayPal checkout, Venmo , Pay Later , Fraud Protection Advanced (FPA) , and much more. “The PayPal Braintree integration was our single biggest IT success story that we’ve ever had at this company,” said Keay. “Not just through the speed of integration but through the partnership and collaboration.”

And there are so many components to this collaboration. Avelo customers are adopting PayPal Checkout at rates that have exceeded Avelo’s key performance indicators (KPI’s). Keay explained that “We have better data when the customer books through PayPal and a greater ability to track the demographics, and to better know our customers.”

Knowing that their customers were interested in flexible ways to pay for their flights, Avelo integrated dynamic messaging for PayPal’s Pay Later solutions. Customers can choose between Pay in 4, a short-term, interest-free offer for purchases between $30-$1,500, or, Pay Monthly, a longer-term, interest-bearing offer for purchases between $199-$10,000. 2 By messaging the Pay Later solutions early in the checkout process, customers are aware of these options.

“Quite frankly Pay Later is delivering above and beyond our expectations,” said Keay. “We use dynamic messaging for Pay Later because it drives higher conversion, and it’s a beautifully simplistic product.”

FPA is like a traffic controller, providing Avelo with critical insights and control relating to the customers on their site. With PayPal’s advanced machine learning and analytics, FPA helps Avelo manage fraud and ensure that as many credit worthy customers as possible are being approved.

“The ability to adjust the filters in Fraud Protection Advanced has been exciting for us. The PayPal team confirmed that our fraud filters are optimized and that is evident in our conversion rates,” said Keay.

Collectively, these PayPal products provide Avelo with an integrated payments solution that delivers scalability, security, flexibility, and innovation, ensuring their customers a seamless checkout.

The impact – PayPal helps deliver higher approval and conversion rates, and rich data intelligence to help manage fraud.

The strong collaboration between Avelo and PayPal has been developed with exceptional care and attentiveness, yielding impressive results. Avelo has seen a 3% increase in overall approval rates since integrating PayPal Braintree. 3 According to Keay, “That increase is huge. And that means we are increasing the number of customers who are able to successfully checkout.”

PayPal Pay Later messaging assures customers that Avelo offers the most trusted brand in payments at checkout even if they choose to pay in full. “With Pay Later, we actually experienced a 22% increase in the average order value,” noted Keay. 4

“Fraud Protection Advanced (FPA) is working brilliantly as well,” said Keay. FPA helps streamline the checkout experience for trusted travelers by creating frictionless customer journeys that help increase conversion rates, reduce good customer declines, and increase customer lifetime value. FPA has helped Avelo to reduce their overall chargeback rate by 15.5%. 5

As Avelo Airlines continues to strive to make travel easier for their customers, PayPal’s solutions align with that goal. The strong collaboration and communication have proven instrumental in streamlining the customer checkout experience. PayPal’s strategic offerings help Avelo fuel growth to deliver convenient, nonstop flights so their customers can fly more, for less.

Avelo Case Study (PDF)

Was this content helpful?

Related content

Sign up to stay informed.

Share your email to receive the latest enterprise updates, top stories, and industry reports.

*Required fields

I consent to PayPal contacting me by phone or by email, and to sending me product or industry information relevant to my query. I know I can unsubscribe at any time.

We use cookies to improve your experience on our site. May we use marketing cookies to show you personalized ads? Manage all cookies