Integrated Business Planning

Linking strategic targets with tactical and operative planning on all levels of the enterprise

Integrated Business Planning (IBP) is a holistic planning methodology that global enterprises can employ to generate maximum profit, cash flow, and return on assets. Through IBP, enterprises can eliminate siloed views and partial financials. IBP creates a unified model of the entire enterprise – one that enhances decision support and operational planning processes and builds a complete set of financials.

When organizations incorporate Integrated Business Planning into their operational framework, they can truly leverage their information assets. This enables executives, business unit managers, and planning managers to evaluate plans/activities to determine what products, processes, and investments will deliver the most positive economic impact to the organization.

Integrated Business Planner™ provides an integrated decision support and planning platform that delivers a decisive competitive advantage:

• Generating a holistic understanding of key drivers of profitability, cash flow, and Return on Assets (ROA)
• Quantifying the financial impact and interdependencies across strategic options to maximize the effectiveness of investments in products, customers, channels and operations
• Automatically aligning budgets and financial targets with the outputs of strategic decisions
• Supporting detailed profitability analyses by product, customer, channel, and asset
• Increasing organizational agility to quickly and effectively respond to changes in the business environment
• Enabling proper financial quantification of the impact of alternative sustainability strategies and business risk scenarios

Integrated Business Planning exists because current planning processes fall short

In many organizations today, there are planning process limitations. Executives and other managers find that they have to make financial decisions with limited business context. Additionally, siloed processes and perspectives prevent optimal financial outcomes; policies are often not optimized for system-wide financials, and operational strategy is not integrated with policy and tactical planning.

With Integrated Business Planner, enterprises can:

• Enable a cross-functional strategy to model relevant constraints and optimize to financials
• Optimize policies to enterprise-wide profitability, while maintaining alignment with strategy
• Enhance existing planning processes/systems to expand collaboration and optimize profitability
• Automatically feed the budgeting and financial planning process

River Logic’s predictive modeling platform, Enterprise Optimizer®, delivers on the Integrated Business Planning vision

Conventional modeling technology addresses only isolated problems. While there are established standards like OLAP-data modeling, which has proven to be fast and flexible for management reporting and budgeting, it limits business modeling capability. Optimization-based, constraint modeling (LP, MILP, and NLP) can optimize business processes within established parameters and provides dozens of solvers for different problem sets, but it limits flexibility. The sizes of models are limited by user capability and they require manual set-up and sequencing of equations.

Constraint-Oriented Reasoning (COR), as found in Enterprise Optimizer, automatically generates all the constraints in a system. Enterprise Optimizer provides cross-functional decision support, advanced and dynamic analyses, and the flexibility to reflect changes in a business environment.