What is Integrated Business Planning?

Today, Finance leaders are adopting integrated business planning (IBP) to evolve their corporate performance management (CPM) processes, allowing them to simplify financial processes and align financial goals with operational plans. This approach gives organizations increased levels of agility, real-time collaboration, insightful analysis, and increased business value by empowering them to make decisions with confidence.

In short, IBP aligns business goals and financial targets with decisions and execution across the entire organization. For finance and business leaders evaluating a move to IBP, a modern and unified platform will help support collaboration by technically enabling finance and operations to make better decisions while achieving optimal performance and return on investment. By leveraging the right platform, companies will benefit from the ability to create real-time, rolling forecasts with the speed and agility required to address the needs of today's business climate.

As an example, in a manufacturing company that embraces IBP, there's a direct line from purchasing, production, and inventory to sales and marketing to financial targets and budgets. A key IBP benefit is that materials are bought at the right price, at the right time, and in just the right quantity to fulfill market demand. Successful IBP delivers closer collaboration and more trust among departments, leading to improved decision-making.

Companies that undertake IBP realize several practical benefits, including reduced holding costs, more responsive customer service and demand fulfillment, shorter time to market for new products, and an improved correlation between demand planning and fulfillment.

Three additional key benefits on Integrated Business Planning:

Real-time insights: For example, once companies have instituted rolling forecasts, finance can quickly and accurately answer questions on spending and cash flow, allowing for more accurate KPIs across the board.
Ownership: All employees assume responsibility for meeting all goals.
Improved customer satisfaction: Better planning yields better insights into what customers want.

As modern finance leaders take on expanded leadership roles, many are leveraging executive dashboards as a natural tool to collaborate with their business partners and facilitate recurring executive meetings. This creates alignment between financial goals and business plans through the use of visualizations to tell the business story behind the numbers, bringing focus to the highest priorities and decision needs. For sophisticated global enterprises, IBP requires a technical solution that is flexible and scalable across the entire organization while enabling the business to plan without compromise.

How can MindStream help?

MindStream Analytics is a premier advisory and managed services provider. We help organizations acquire, implement, and manage strategic finance solutions designed to grow your business by bringing people, processes, and information together. Our team is made up of business and technical experts with years of experience with Oracle Hyperion, OneStream, NetSuite, and other major technology vendors.

We know that to excel in today's competitive environment, companies must have analytical insight across their organization for a clearer view of corporate-wide performance. We believe the power of technology, combined with best practices and access to relevant information, helps companies gain a competitive advantage by simplifying financial processes and align financial goals with operational plans.