Finally, our second book is available in
stores and my free samples are waiting on my desk to be distributed to the friends and colleagues who supported this project! I say "finally" as it has been a 2 years journey since Robert had the initiative and desire to write a book focused on Integrated Business Planning. Who would have thought that writing about planning requires so much planning? And not only planning but also exception management!
Since we have published the first book, the following two questions are the most frequent we received:
Q: What is the IBP Springer book series about? Is there any differentiator from the other books that were released by different publishers over the last months?
A: As we published two books and most likely created some confusion with the almost identical covers, I will answer the questions for each book separately.
- The first book, Integrated Business Planning, answers Why and What questions (Why IBP? What processes? What to consider as the foundation for the IBP transformation?) with the scope to build a big picture framework for the IBP process. For more details see this overview post.
- The second book, Implementing Integrated Business Planning, is focused on How? (How to implement IBP?). It does not answer the How question from a configuration perspective, but by illustrating tens of use cases that cover strategic, tactic and operational planning, monetization of forecasts, and process measurement.
To conclude, these books are process oriented, business to technology, using SAP IBP as the technology enabler for the Integrated Business Planning process.
Cheers on behalf of the authors
Robert Kepczynski Alecsandra Dimofte Raghav Jandhyala Ganesh Manikandan Sankaran Andrew Boyle