Is your S&OP or IBP process delivering expected results? Before abandoning it, consider Sinek's Golden Circle approach—revisit why you need it, how it's executed, and what it entails. Many implementations fail by focusing too much on mechanics and too little on strategic purpose and cultural requirements.
Strategic effectiveness isn't measured by document length or analytical complexity. When our half-page of practical decision rules impressed acquisition executives, it revealed a powerful truth: the best strategies provide clear guidance for daily decisions, emerge from business practice, and use simple rules everyone can understand and apply.
S&OP and IBP are often confused terms with important distinctions. While S&OP primarily balances supply and demand volumes with a shorter horizon, IBP represents an evolution—a comprehensive management process with longer planning horizons, executive involvement, value-based decisions, and integrated business functions working from one set of numbers
By bringing more senior executive team involvement to sales & operations planning (S&OP) with Integrated Business Planning (IBP) there was an expectation that this would enable better execution of strategy. However, too often IBP implementations do not lead…
At DuPont, I was fortunate to work with Pete Compo as the ideas forming the Emergent Approach to Strategy were developed. In recent years I has been involved in the preparation of the Emergent Approach to Strategy and am the first affiliated partner to deliver to help product line and business teams design and implement adaptive strategies.…
As a young boy mesmerised by murmurations of starlings with my grandad in Norfolk I was filled with curiosity. How could the birds be organised to perform such complex dynamic manoeuvres? Little did I realise then how these summer evening displays would influence my business thinking in years to come..
The business press is seemingly clear – we are now living in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous VUCA world (as if it was not before!) Even if this really were a new paradigm as some claim it to be, have we adapted our approach to business strategy to reflect this VUCA environment?
Finding the key bottleneck to achieving your aspiration brings focus to both strategy design and execution. Root cause analysis techniques can be powerful tools to expose the hidden bottleneck.