At the heart of the Integrated Business Planning (IBP) process is a five-step monthly planning cycle, comprising a series of scheduled review meetings for product or activity management; demand; supply; integrated reconciliation; and the management business review.
Unless organizations implement these meetings effectively to review, present, and communicate progress and change, their Sales & Operation Process (S&OP) will never mature beyond a simple forecast run by the supply chain to estimate required production volumes.
One of the challenges for organizations, which are new to IBP or which are trying to transition from traditional S&OP to IBP, is to make these individual review meetings as productive as possible.
The objective should be to sign off the plan at each step of the IBP process (product, demand, supply, etc.), and 'sign-off' means that every Chair of the five review meetings has agreed:
The IBP review meetings should not be discovery meetings but action-oriented: key assumptions supporting each part of the plan need to be understood; any changes from previously agreed plans acknowledged and the implications of these changes identified; and finally, action plans need to be agreed to support the business over a 24-month horizon.
In order for this to work effectively, each of the IBP reviews plans needs to be visualized, so it can be validated and then signed off. A clear structure is therefore essential to retain focus and to drive key meeting outcomes.
Many companies have developed 'meeting effectiveness templates' to assist in driving S&OP process improvement but often these become overly complicated and as a result, counter-productive.
The Five Question Concept
These are the key questions that need to be considered by all participants and answered by the end of each IBP review meeting in order for plans to be 'signed off':
Download Five Simple Questions: How to get the best from your S&OP or IBP process and learn how to ensure that these essential programs have the greatest impact.