Rolling Out Integrated Business Planning (IBP) Across Global Brands

The Challenge

A premium luxury beauty conglomerate sought to create a unified Integrated Business Planning (IBP) framework across brands with vastly different structures. Each operated independently, with fragmented processes, short-term focus, and limited visibility into risk and opportunity.

Our Approach

Izba helped design and roll out a tailored IBP framework that respected each brand’s rhythm while enforcing global discipline:

• Custom cadence: One skincare brand adopted a single monthly IBP meeting; another skincare brand added feeder sessions to build structured inputs throughout the month.
• Cross-functional alignment: Finance, supply, and demand teams synchronized forecasts, capacity planning, and performance reviews on an 18-month horizon.
• Risk management: Created a “gap summary” tool to quantify risks and opportunities over 6, 12, and 18 months—driving executive discussions with data.
• Accountability: Introduced Executive Gap Review (EGR) meetings to ensure decisions, ownership, and timelines were clearly defined.

The Outcome

The IBP rollout replaced reactive planning with a continuous cycle of review and improvement:

• Forecast accuracy increased through structured inputs and shared data ownership.
• Decision speed improved via consolidated financial and operational visibility.
• Cross-team transparency fostered collaboration and proactive risk management.
• Scalable model: The approach is now being evaluated for expansion to additional Unilever brands.

Izba helped move this conglomerate from siloed planning to synchronized, insight-driven operations—balancing flexibility with rigor.