Scalable IBP Improves Forecasts, Speeds Decisions

Scaling fast — without end-to-end planning visibility

The challenge

Rapid growth and increasing complexity in the manufacturer’s engineer-to-order (ETO) business exposed significant gaps in their planning and decision-making processes. Disconnected silos between sales, operations, and finance hindered visibility, slowed decision-making, and constrained the organization’s ability to efficiently meet growing customer demands. The existing product hierarchy and manual processes further exacerbated inefficiencies, making it difficult to align demand, capacity, and financial goals.

The solution

We designed and implemented an Integrated Business Planning (IBP) framework tailored to their high-growth, ETO environment. The process was built to strengthen cross-functional collaboration, improve visibility, and enable faster, more informed decisions.

We analyzed the data, its accuracy, and how the data flows into the system to ensure good data hierarchy and structure that will ultimately simplify reporting and planning. We also reviewed relevant SAP Analytics Cloud reports to provide feedback on how to further automate and improve reporting that supports the IBP metrics and process.

To ensure this remains sustainable and efficient, we worked to correct the product hierarchy and evaluated S&OP tooling to support future state scalability and scenario planning, while leveraging existing SAP data and initiated master data and product hierarchy improvements to support planning accuracy.

This clear, end-to-end IBP operating rhythm strengthened cross-functional planning and decision-making by:

• Improving how demand and capacity were evaluated.
• Simplifying reporting and creating executive-ready views of performance to improve transparency and adoption
• Enabling faster trade-off decisions through a structured risks and opportunities lens.
• Fitting within organization’s existing meeting cadences to minimize any change management burden while remaining scalable for future needs.
• Documenting the current state end-to-end quote to order baseline and designing the future state process with established SLAs, ownership, gate requirements, and escalation paths.
• Addressing the underlying product hierarchy fragmentation and redesigning it with stakeholders to restore visibility and support stronger reporting as the business continues to grow.

The results

The client’s sales and supply chain teams are working together more closely, so the forecast is more accurate, and the product pipeline is clearer. A cleaner product hierarchy and better metrics also support year-over-year revenue analysis and ongoing growth.

The new IBP process delivered a 15% improvement in forecast accuracy by aligning sales and supply chain teams, reducing variance between forecast and actuals. The client also realized a 40% reduction in quote-to-order processing time, with an average of 28 risks, opportunities and/or escalations now actioned per month. Cycle time from weeks per individual step was also reduced to a full 5-step IBP cycle within ~3 weeks, enabling a complete, end-to-end view and freeing capacity for higher-value analysis and decision-making.

Leaders now have a clearer view of margin, service, and risk, which helps them make faster, better decisions. Monthly IBP reviews take less time because reporting is more automated, and clear KPIs help drive accountability.