The IBP Blueprint | A system for executive teams who need results, not meetings

The problem

Everyone attended. Nobody decided.

The forecast was reviewed. The gaps were discussed. The difficult trade-off was taken offline. Then the same issue returned the following month. If that sounds familiar, the problem may not be another missing dashboard. It may be the way decisions are prepared, owned, and carried into execution.

01Where is the bottleneck this week, in reality?

Not in theory. Not last quarter. Today.

02Which decision are we avoiding because it is political?

Allocation. Portfolio. Capex. The customer promise.

03Where is our cash stuck?

Not "too much stock". In the wrong SKU, the wrong decoupling point, the work in progress that never moves.

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.

See the blueprint before you buy it

Nine phases. The whole operating model, in order.

This is the structure of the book, not a list of promises. Phase I opens on the illusion, phase IX closes on the cash.

	Phase	What you work through
I	The illusion of planningWhy IBP often delivers negative ROI	Why most executives see little ROI, value against volume, and the hidden tax of slow decisions.
II	Fake IBPThe diagnostic leaders actually need	The ten-minute spot check, the banned phrases list, and the quiet blockers behind a fake yes.
III	Respect the physicsLVHM, CTO and ETO reality	Why the plan lies in high-mix, long-lead work, which bottlenecks matter, and what to stop riding.
IV	Executive trapsWhy smart leaders keep IBP weak	The best-practice trap, the software mirage, and the parallel-finance trap.
V	The buildDecision architecture that runs LVHM, CTO and ETO	Decision rights, the minimum viable cadence, the decision log, triggers and guardrails, metrics that do not lie.
VI	Scale and sustainMake IBP the management system, not a project	Leader behaviour, onboarding and succession, continuous improvement, culture and conflict.
VII	From IBP to strategyTurn decisions into advantage	Segmentation, portfolio power and killing the right SKUs, engineering and capacity as levers, the strategic loop.
VIII	The hard truthsWhat IBP cannot fix, and what leaders must	Bad strategy, the demand you accept, culture as policy enforcement, and the one-number fantasy.
IX	IBP for cash release	Where the cash is stuck, and what releasing it costs in service.

Put the blueprint on your desk

One book to read.
One quarter to run differently.

Nine phases. Thirty-two chapters. Four real cases from the field, including the one where a controller went on maternity leave and the whole cadence died with her.

Format	Ebook and paperback
Price	$9 ebook · $42 paperback
Length	365 pages, English
ISBN	978-981-94-7439-4
Edition	First edition, 2026

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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.

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

The $15bn company

They signed for the software. They still needed an operating model.

A $15bn company, a leading IBP provider, both CEOs pictured in the news. Inside the business, reporting still ran on Excel, planning depended on tribal knowledge, and production priorities were set planner by planner.

40%

excess inventory, with budgets significantly off target

Weeks went into slides and debates about numbers nobody trusted. The difficult decisions stayed unresolved.

The software agreement was signed. The rules for running the business were not in place.

That is why I wrote the book: to put the operating model, not another reporting meeting, at the centre of the conversation.

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About the author

Frederic Gomer

Managing Partner at B2G Consulting.

20 years leading IBP and S&OP implementation across 100+ plants.

Practical relevance

Read it with your next leadership conversation in mind.

Use the sample to judge whether the approach helps you frame the questions your own team is facing. These are questions to test the book against, not guaranteed outcomes from buying it.

OperationsWhich exceptions can the team resolve, and which need an executive decision?

FinanceWhat is the financial consequence of the trade-off, and what assumptions sit behind it?

CommercialWhat customer promise can the business support, and what changes when demand or mix shifts?

Executive leadershipWho decides, by when, and how does that decision reach execution?

You don’t need another reporting meeting.
You need more decisions.