People Watching: HR’s Role in Integrated Business Planning

Integrated Business Planning (IBP), sometimes described as advanced or next-generation Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) is a common-sense process designed for effective decision-making. Increasingly adopted by organizations across many industries and sectors, IBP allows senior management to plan and manage the entire organization over a 24-month horizon or more, aligning strategic and tactical plans each month, and allocating the critical resources – people, equipment, inventory, materials, time, and money – to satisfy customers in the most profitable way. Despite the increasing adoption of IBP and its general acceptance as ‘the way to run a business’, we still see instances where plans from certain functions in an organization are being left out. A key example is Human Resources (HR).