Building a Strong Foundation: The Importance of an Integrated Business Plan for Global Clients
When a business is looking to grow, they need strategic planning and results-driven objectives. This is even more true when a business has a global footprint and is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s what happened when a $450M Supplement and Vitamins Consumer brand connected with our team. They were looking for a global standard IBP (integrated business planning) process that would align their business and financial operational plans and ultimately lead to projected growth.
At the time, the company had focused on IBP improvements in some of their regions, but not as a collective team to drive to a standard global process. Their CFO reached out because he knew the impact of success with IBP processes at previous companies. He believed an IBP process would help place the company on a path for future growth.
Setting the Stage for Clear Goals
Joan Spiller, Zefyr team member, took the lead on the project, and worked at ensuring the right people were in the room from the beginning. Because an Integrated Business Planning process would touch many areas of the business, the client had representatives from all regions and functions (supply chain, finance, marketing and sales) on the Zoom calls and chats with Joan and the Zefyr team. Furthermore, there were bi-weekly meetings with the leadership project sponsors to align with the ongoing work and to check-in on any decisions that might be needed throughout the project.
One of our team’s initial goals was to get a clear sense of the client’s current processes and their specific needs. As part of our process management analysis, we were also looking at the client’s supply chain. Where were they efficient? Where were there gaps? And finally, before implementing any changes, we aligned on the goal to set up a best-in-class standard process across all regional and global teams.
Creating Actionable Core Objectives
Each of our clients have different internal hurdles as well as resources to implement for future wins. Our goal was - and always is - to provide the best solution for that specific client. With our team’s decades of experience, we knew how to fit the pieces together to develop a winning strategy, we just needed to know which pieces made sense for this project. Being clear with our client on their end-goal ensured that everyone was on the same page and that full transparency was provided. True in all organizations, but especially with a global client, it was incredibly important to create a standard across all of their markets and that their processes and supply chain were transparent and responsive to our recommendations. Therefore, our objectives included the following:
Objective 1: Pivot from “reporting the month” to a “live decision making” to drive impactful decisions.
What did this look like?
Prior to our project, one of the regions would share a detailed report with metrics and information, but did not have a forum to bring any issues/discussion topics to the meeting for decisions. We determined that with the IBP process we should adjust the regional meetings format to promote decision making.
Objective 2: Align roles and responsibilities across the regional and global teams.
What did this look like?
We had workshops with both the regional and global teams to agree on the agendas, attendees/roles and templates to use. Then we would get signoff from the leadership project sponsors.
Objective 3: Simplify the IBP process with clearly defined Decision Rights and updated Roles and Responsibilities.
What did this look like?
For the IBP process, we had a separate workshop session to align on Decision Rights and Responsibilities for each meeting.
Objective 4: Develop standardized global KPI’s and targets.
What did this look like?
We worked with the client to align on eleven metrics. For example, forecast accuracy with a target of 90%. Or DOH (Days on Hand) with a target of 4 days of improvement vs last year. This helped us standardize goals across all regions.
Delivering On Goals and More
After six months, we were pleased to provide clear updates on the goals we had set with our client and a pathway forward that would allow for continued growth. We reached all of the objectives we had set forth with a few of those objectives resulting in cost and time savings for the future. For instance, once we had supply chain transparency, we were able to identify areas where the client could save money. We anticipated that these changes would result in savings between $3 and $4 million in total over a twelve-month period. Furthermore, internal processes were improved, saving time and effort that could be used more efficiently elsewhere. This change occurred with the introduction of "live" decision reviews where decisions were actively made during meetings (versus their former process of “reading” presentations and deciding afterwards.). As a result of this change, the client is estimating a 15% reduction in the time and effort required to prepare for meetings.
Integrated business planning process tools provide a multitude of benefits for the businesses that implement them, including a transparent and comprehensive view of the entire business operation, better decision-making with access to integrated data and advanced analytics, scenario planning to evaluate the potential impact of different business decisions in the future, and an overall increased alignment with the business strategy as a whole. At Zefyr, we are the partner to support our clients’ evolution through implementing this process, and working with them as an extension of their team. To learn how we can help your business, contact us today: https://www.zefyrconsulting.com/contact