The Three Aspects of Integrated Business Planning

Integrated business planning involves the utilization of multiple streams of data from different departments to come up with a dynamic business plan. This enables your business to come up with a more accurate and effective plan. Integrated business planning also allows your firm to quickly and easily adjust the plan based on unexpected events. Effective integrated business planning has three different aspects: annual planning, long-term planning, and sales and operations planning, and sales and operations execution. Read on to learn more about the three aspects of integrated business planning.

Annual Planning

The first and perhaps most important aspect of integrated business planning is annual planning. Accurate annual planning is necessary to ensure that your business keeps pace with the global marketplace, which is always changing and evolving. Traditional annual planning, however, can be inefficient and can use up a significant amount of resources.

Integrated business planning, on the other hand, produces an annual plan that is continuously updated. Also, IBP, as it’s often known, gives your business not just an operating plan, but also a financial plan. These integrated plans include current information about new product development, strategic initiatives, demand, supply, and finance. A well-integrated plan will distill all of this information into key points to make decision-making easier.

The Benefits of Including Annual Planning in Your Integrated Business Plan

There are four specific benefits that your business can see from making annual planning an important part of your IBP. These benefits include increasing profits, improving efficiency, ensuring better collaboration, and ensuring throughput. This is why many businesses make annual planning the focus of their integrated business plan.

Annual planning can increase profits by helping you control costs. Many companies do not practice IBP, so their annual business plans are not as effective. This means that your firm can gain a competitive advantage by using IBP. Annual planning as part of an IBP also increase your business’ efficiency. This is because your business can predict demand more accurately and manage your supply chain accordingly. An integrated annual business plan can also improve collaboration throughout your firm by keeping employees from different departments working toward the same goals. Finally, an annual plan can increase throughput by decreasing delays throughout the supply chain.

Long-Term Planning

Many businesses overlook long-term planning in favor of short-term planning and annual planning. This is especially common if the business is in short-term financial trouble. However, this can get the management of a business thinking only about the short-term, which will be detrimental in the long-term. This is why long-term planning is always essential, even when the business is in short-term difficulty. Integrated business planning always includes a long-term plan for this reason.

Long-term planning can immediately affect sales operations and product development. The financial and volumetric data in a long-term plan can help the sales operations and product development teams set intermediate goals that they can shoot for in the near future.

Putting a Long-Term Plan into Action

Putting a long-term plan into action can be challenging, but the right IBP software can break it into smaller pieces to make it easier. One of the most important parts of putting a long-term plan into action is creating a collaborative workflow across departments. It is also important to create calendars that include intermediate goals that will contribute to the long-term plan. It is also vital that the software includes in-built alerts if your business strays off the paths set by your long-term plan.

Sales & Operations Planning & Sales & Operations Execution

The third aspect of integrated business planning is sales and operations planning (S&OP) and sales and operations execution (S&OE). This may sound like two different areas, but these practices are so closely linked that they are usually considered to be one aspect of IBP. S&OP and S&OE help businesses find a balance between their supply operations and their demand generation operations. It is vital that these two departments work closely together, yet this is very difficult to achieve in practice. This is where IBP comes in.

This challenge is made more difficult by the fact that employees in many departments directly influence both supply operations and demand operations. This is why an IBP software solution is so important. It allows the C-suite employees and the supply chain, manufacturing production, sales, finance, and marketing teams to see the same data and work from a single plan