The IBP Blueprint | Frederic Gomer | A system for executive teams

What you get

Four things this book makes you able to do.

DiagnosisSpot fake IBP in ten minutes

The ten phrases that give it away, the five numbers that never reconcile, and the phase you are actually in.

SurgeryCut the silos and the shadow spreadsheets

Kill the real forecast running beside the plan, and give every trade-off one named owner with a date.

RehabStabilise in 30 days, rebuild in 180

Executive IBP, pre-exec, weekly S&OE, the frozen zone and the decision log that makes the handover real.

Cash releaseUnlock working capital without collapsing service

Where the cash is actually stuck, which inventory is protecting a bad decision, and the order to release it in.

What you will not get

Three things this book refuses to give you.

A software recommendation

IBP is not a tool problem. Chapter 11 is about the mirage you are about to buy.

A best practice checklist

Best practice does not survive contact with physics. The book works from the bottleneck, not from a template.

Meetings that end in "noted"

This book removes hiding places. Every decision gets an owner, a cost and an audit date.

It is for the people who are accountable for the outcome: the CEO or division president, the COO, the VP Supply Chain, and the CFO who is tired of two sets of numbers.

The $15bn company

"They had just signed with a leading IBP tool. The reporting still ran on Excel."

A $15bn company signs a strategic agreement with a leading IBP provider.

Photos of both CEOs in the news, the client and the vendor.

The company reporting runs on an Excel spreadsheet.

There is no planning process.

The sales team makes the forecast and the demand plan instead of getting deals.

Tribal knowledge, no standard processes, limited discipline.

Inventory objectives are known, and ignored by the production planners, who decide what gets produced, in which priority, in which quantity.

MOQs are mostly ignored. Orders below MOQ are accepted, and produced at MOQ.

The rules of engagement with customers are non-existent: no segmentation, no service levels.

Customers get what they get.

Delivery is not consistently reliable.

Capacity planning is complex, informal, and highly planner dependent.

Then the results, in the words they used with me.

Budgets always significantly off, by far.

Excess inventory above forty percent.

Firefighting becomes the operating mode: leadership is not working on the system, it is working in the system, every day, all day.

Weeks of slides. Debates about numbers nobody trusts. A P&L never shaped in the room.

That is the reason I decided to write this book.

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100+plant recoveries led with his team over 20 years

About the author

Frederic Gomer

Managing Partner at B2G Consulting.

20 years leading operational turnarounds across 100+ plants.

The IBP Blueprint is the second book in the series. The first turned plants around. This one fixes the system that decides.

Where the decision lives

The fire you are fighting this week was a decision nobody took three months ago.

12-18
monthsExecutive IBP

Demand policy, supply policy, capacity, portfolio, the financial commit. The room where trade-offs are arbitrated, not reported.

3-12
monthsPre-exec IBP

Where the options are built and priced before they reach the executive room: load, mix, allocation, capex, customer promise.

0-12
weeksS&OE, weekly

The order book against available supply, the allocation rules already decided in IBP, the exceptions that do not need a strategy.

This
weekMPS and daily execution

The schedule, the sequence, the escalation. Guarded by a frozen zone, or the week rebuilds itself every Monday morning.

"If expedite spend is flat or rising, S&OE is documenting fires, not preventing them."
The IBP Blueprint, chapter 17b

Two rooms, two teams, one handover point: the decision log. IBP sets the policy, S&OE runs it, and when it cannot act inside policy it escalates with a recommendation, a cost and a deadline. When the same people run both, the urgent always crowds out the important, and the eighteen month horizon shrinks to three.

The cost of a reporting engine

If you cannot answer those three, the bill arrives anyway.

The book opens on a company that had just bought the tool, and on what it was still paying. These are its numbers, not a forecast.

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15-30%

of inventory value tied up in excess: the wrong SKU, the wrong decoupling point, safety stock that is covering a bad decision. It reads as protection on the balance sheet.

10-30%

of operating cost going to premium freight, expedites, rework and the monthly reconciliation nobody puts a price on. Slow decisions are a balance sheet tax.

2-5%

of growth revenue missed while a trade-off waits for the next steering committee. Nobody writes that line down.

Figures from the author’s note in The IBP Blueprint. Chapter 1 is the full arithmetic of negative ROI.

What is inside

Not a framework. The documents you run the cycle with.

01The nine phase diagnostic

From the fake IBP test to the cash release, phase by phase, with the questions that tell you where you actually are.

02Decision rights

One owner per trade-off, written down, and what happens when the same issue comes back a third time.

03The meeting architecture

Executive IBP at twelve to eighteen months, pre-exec below it, and the weekly S&OE that keeps the month honest.

04The one page decision log

Owner, horizon, guardrails, expected impact, assumptions, audit date. The template is in the book, chapter fifteen.

05Triggers and the exception invoice

Pre-agreed thresholds that end the same debate, and a price tag on every request to break policy.

06The four S&OE metrics

Schedule adherence, exceptions inside the frozen zone, escalation quality, expedite spend. No more than four.

Every chapter ends with a What you do Monday list, thirty-two of them, so the book can be handed to a planner on Sunday night and run on Monday morning.

From the field

Operators, not endorsements.

Eight operators wrote the phase forewords to this book, one per phase. These are their words.

"When I started, only 5 percent of decisions were made in executive S&OP. Within a year, we moved that to 80 percent. Not by adding slides or meetings - by shifting management from firefighting discussions to long-term planning."

Andrea PieriSenior Planning Leader and IBP Director, large listed manufacturerForeword, phase VIII

"The short-term magnet was too strong. You need to split it to protect the strategic discussion. We created S&OE to handle the first three months separately."

Dmitry ShlyakhterSupply Chain and S&OP Leader, Swarovski, previously GoogleForeword, phase V

"Different teams for IBP and S&OE with a formal handover point. If the same people handle both, the urgent always crowds out the important."

Mustafa TarcanAMET Supply Chain Head, Opella, formerly Sanofi Consumer HealthcareForeword, phase VII

"A good S&OP is eighty percent people and twenty percent process. You need clear decision rights for each forum and a clear understanding of how to escalate."

Niko HonkasaloSenior Supply Chain and IBP Leader, Mars and WrigleyForeword, phase VI

"You need to remove unnecessary complexity, not add more. Define the steps for your environment, find the right people, and let them rule their domain."

Manfred BahlmannSenior Supply Chain Executive, 35 years across Boeing, Airbus and RocheForeword, phase I

"Process without people commitment produces nothing."

Peter BeerliSenior Supply Chain and S&OP Leader, industrial manufacturingForeword, phase II

"Without clean master data, all your planning is built on sand."

Abdirahman IkarSenior Supply Chain and Investment Strategy, LeicaForeword, phase III

"This is not my process, this is the business's process."

Graham WilkinsonHead of Planning, Kedrion BiopharmaForeword, phase IV

Stop running meetings.
Start running the business.