Process

Integrated Business Planning

Unify strategic, financial, and operational planning in an integrated business platform for a more efficient, effective, collaborative approach

Modern organizations face the task of planning complex, and often global, multi-level business processes which support the business’ strategy and meet finance’s expectations. They are continuously under pressure to balance supply with demand, optimize inventories, push new products to market, and support their growth with adequate human resources, however this is extremely difficult to achieve when there is a disconnect between Strategy, Finance, and Operations.

Typically there is no end-to-end visibility of the entire planning process, with each department working on their own planning activities and not communicating them to the wider business. But when faced with a planning paradox – an increasing number of questions to answer in shorter timeframes and with less resources – organizations need to bring these plans together if they are to maximize efficiency and drive performance.

This is where Board’s integrated business planning software can help.

Why Integrated Business Planning has become best practice

Integrated Business Planning (IBP) enables organizations to bring together three key aspects of planning: strategy, operations, and finance.

In this short video, Robert D. Kugel, SVP and Research Director at Ventana Research,
explains how IBP drives a collaborative, business-first approach across the enterprise.

The benefits of Integrated Business Planning with Board

Creating transparency by unifying all business data, the Board decision-making platform enables planning processes to be integrated across every team and department. Bring everyone onto the same page, ensure plans consider all available resources, skills, and production capabilities, and drive accountability for results by making the impact of performance more visible.

Create business-wide transparency of performance

Achieve alignment between strategic, financial, and operational goals

Empower people to collaborate across departments, business units, and geographic locations

Increase planning, budgeting, and forecasting speed and accuracy

Drive accountability over results

Automate time-consuming manual processes

Organize business planning initiatives

Board’s IBP software gives you greater control over every planning initiative, ensuring you have all the information you need to come to an informed decision.

One version of the truth: Unify data from across the business to create a single, accurate, up-to-date point of truth on which to base all planning activities, ensuring consistency, relevance, and improved forecast quality

Process standardization: Enable an efficient, collaborative approach with workflow and validation checks to control and standardize activities throughout the entire integrated business planning process flow

What-if simulation: Deliver a historical baseline of performance which can be used to simulate the impact of strategic initiatives in the current plan for the short, medium, and long term

Connect operating plans and financial plans

Bridge the gap between finance and operations, creating plans which meet the needs of all departments in a completely integrated business planning process.

Unified approach: Support the seamless cascading of strategic goals down to operational and financial initiatives, linking budgeting processes such as OPEX and CAPEX with financial and strategic planning

Driver-based planning: Deliver simulation capabilities to enable scenario planning and ‘what if’ analysis while assessing and comparing complex scenarios and financial outcomes using business drivers

Fully-integrated: Make it possible to integrate the planning process with profitability analysis, strategy management, the financial close cycle, and financial consolidation, using your decision-making platform as a complete Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) system

Consolidation: Automatically consolidate financial and operating data from multiple departments and business entities for a business-wide view

Synchronize management reporting with the planning process

Create complete transparency over performance and the predicted impact of planned activities on the bottom line, with up-to-date reports available at the click of a button.

Real-time view

Monitor performance to-date in real time, with accurate dashboards and reports which can be shared and distributed to keep you informed at every stage