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SAP and Accenture Collaborate on Getting to Value Faster with SAP Business AI

Generative AI is the number one driver of transformation today. While it may not be the only or final technological breakthrough, embracing generative AI requires both a multi-year change agenda and a continuous transformation program.

And it all starts with value and elevating IT for the AI era with a strong and secure digital core. This includes emphasis on adopting ready-to-scale AI models, a modern data foundation, and a flexible AI architecture that supports the use of multiple foundation models to future-proof organizations from the evolution of technology and model changes.  

According to Accenture research , 40% of C-suite leaders believe their organization will fully scale generative AI enterprise-wide in six to 12 months. Currently organizations are scaling generative AI in select business areas either extensively (56%) or in a limited way (nearly 30%). Only 10% say they have scaled generative AI with extensive adoption across their entire enterprise, and just 13% are “extremely confident” they have the right data strategy and core digital capabilities in place to effectively leverage generative AI.  

That’s why organizations are increasingly turning to SAP and its partners to help them completely transform their business, and why SAP and Accenture are working together to help their customers make SAP Business AI and data their number one competitive advantage.

Accenture Embraces SAP Business AI to Advance Business Outcomes

By Marc-Oliver Klein and Stephanie Guimbellot

SAP and Accenture have been collaborating and working with customers on technology evolution for over 40 years, using their unique strengths to help industries transform and lead in the market.

As AI is integrated into business applications, it is unleashing new levels of productivity and creativity while forging a path to the future that is different and faster than any previous technology wave.

For many clients, 2023 was a year of experimentation with generative AI. In 2024, we’re focusing on helping clients realize value at scale by going after the business potential in enterprise data with AI, strengthening digital core with embedded AI capabilities, enhancing business functions with AI insights, and accelerating revenue growth with SAP Business AI offerings like Joule, generative AI hub, SAP Datasphere, and SAP HANA Cloud vector engine.

“In partnership with SAP and its customers, we’re emphasizing must-dos for the C-suite,” said Lan Guan, chief AI officer at Accenture. “That includes leading with value, investing in a digital core, nurturing talent, practicing responsible AI, and committing to continuous reinvention. This is how you capitalize on AI’s inflection moment strategically.”

And with Joule, business process reinvention and change adoption in cloud ERP just got easier through new capabilities to boost IT and business user experiences. Accenture plans to embrace the consulting capability for Joule and ABAP code generation in compressed cloud ERP transformations and will collaborate on the consulting capability for Joule with a team of AI experts and prompt designers to facilitate relevant user responses aligned with SAP industry best practices and clean core strategies.

“Our ecosystem plays a critical role in helping our customers adopt SAP Business AI to get immediate value from these exciting new technologies and solutions,” said SAP Chief AI Officer Philipp Herzig. “We very much value our long-standing partnership with Accenture. They have long been an important partner in the industry for bringing innovation to our joint customers, now also by activating SAP’s embedded AI capabilities, including Joule, and building customer use cases on SAP Business Technology Platform with SAP AI Core and generative AI hub. I look forward to our continued collaboration and the outcomes that generative AI will deliver in both business transformations and operations for our customers.”

Accenture is already working on various use cases that leverage SAP Business AI offerings, and the company continues to take an early leadership position in SAP Business AI.

• Accenture’s financial advisor , an SAP 2024 Innovation award winner, uses SAP AI core and large language models (LLMs) to deliver untapped financial value in financial ledgers and transactions. It is helping Accenture business and finance leaders reduce decision-making time by 15%, reduce financial narrative efforts by 60%, and mitigate risks with real-time financial data insights, including 13,000+ user alerts per month.
• Accenture’s supply chain nerve center uses AI models to enable intelligent, responsive, and risk-resilient supply chains to help clients manage disruptions, identify improvements, and resolve issues. The nerve center uses SAP’s generative AI hub and SAP Business Technology Platform, which connects to an LLM fully integrated with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Integrated Business Planning, and SAP Intelligent Asset Management.

Accenture is also evolving its assets and platforms including GenWizard, SynOpps, and AI Navigator for Enterprise to help clients move to cloud ERP faster and achieve earlier business outcomes.

Make Decisions Easier with SAP Business Transformation Solutions and Large Process Models

By Hartmut Poppinga and José Morán Moya

SAP and Accenture are teaming on SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX solutions to help customers with the quantitative insights they need to get alignment and buy-in on cloud ERP and the foundation to tap into the full value of generative AI.

The combined power of SAP and Accenture is helping customers examine business processes at every level of the organization, establish what works, discard what doesn’t and use their own data to create a business case and measure success and value over time. SAP is helping with foundational implementation and Accenture teams are providing analysis, insights, advisory and process modeling. This collaboration is significantly reducing the time it takes clients to complete current state and gap analysis to get to value faster.

“The long-standing partnership between Accenture and SAP is characterized by delivering successful transformation outcomes to our mutual customers,” said Mani Pirouz, chief business officer of SAP Signavio and LeanIX. “Through our joint offerings we help companies become agile, resilient, and intelligent enterprises. SAP Signavio plays a crucial role in transformations by providing insights, collaboration, governance, and execution capabilities for continuous process improvements. These allow companies to unlock business value above and beyond their technical road maps.”

SAP and Accenture’s focus is grounded in a value-led method, cloud ERP business case, and road map that takes a holistic approach to an organization’s full value chain and helps customers:

• Understand the potential to reinvent the value chain and develop end-to-end capabilities powered by generative AI and new ways of working
• Be value-led in every business capability chosen to reinvent with generative AI
• Identify strategic bets where the technology creates differentiated sources of value that cannot be easily captured by competitors
• Reorient the organization from siloed functions to end-to-end business capabilities and decision-making through a unified data architecture and cross-functional teams

“Combining Accenture’s deep industry expertise with SAP solutions helps clients define and realize value in a systematic way,” said Caspar Borggreve, senior managing director and lead of Accenture SAP Business Group. “This is about shifting the focus from siloed use cases to a holistic look at industry value chains to prioritize investments, achieve efficiencies, benefit from generative AI, and scale competitiveness.”

Learn more about Accenture + SAP . 

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January 27, 2021

Accenture and SAP® to Help Organizations Transform Their Business through RISE with SAP

Accenture brings technology and industry services that simplify the move to cloud and boost innovation

NEW YORK, Jan. 27, 2021 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) is working with SAP to help organizations accelerate business transformation through cloud-based deployments of SAP® solutions. With a goal of supporting clients at any stage of their transformation journey, Accenture is offering solutions and services that help lower the cost and risk of migrating SAP S/4HANA® to the cloud and pave the way for a reinvention of business models and processes.

New research from Accenture found that the vast majority of companies recognize that cloud provides the means to a variety of business benefits – greater cost efficiencies, improved service levels, and greater speed to market as well as enabling reimagined business models and improving business resilience. However, just 37% of companies say they are achieving the full value expected on cloud investments. Accenture and SAP are working together to help clients embark on business transformation through RISE with SAP, a new business transformation offering that uses the flexibility of public or private cloud infrastructure to provide the full intelligent enterprise experience, including the enterprise resource planning capabilities of SAP S/4HANA and integration with SAP Business Technology Platform.

Accenture’s approach to building on cloud can reduce many upfront migration costs, allowing more resources to be invested in creating new ways of working and new innovations that add business value. With a core system based on SAP S/4HANA on an agile cloud infrastructure, clients can quickly implement industry-specific processes and use joint solutions and extend functionality on SAP Business Technology Platform to simplify deployments. “There are many options for moving SAP applications to the cloud; the path to embrace these changes is unique to every organization. The newly launched RISE with SAP clarifies options for clients in their journey to transform into intelligent enterprises,” said Caspar Borggreve, global lead for the Accenture SAP Business Group. “With our experience in SAP solutions, SAP Business Technology Platform and cloud deployments, Accenture brings an exceptional combination of industry and functional expertise and innovation at scale to power transformation across every facet of the business. We deliver 360ᵒ value through a smart approach that uses automation, existing investments and modern implementation methods to deliver solutions with greater speed and less disruption.” Accenture is recognized as a leading partner to the world’s major cloud providers and recently launched Accenture Cloud First , a new multi-service group of 70,000 cloud professionals focused on enabling organizations to move to the cloud with greater speed and achieve greater value for all their stakeholders at this critical time. Accenture also works side-by-side with SAP to help companies improve business operations with industry-specific solutions based on SAP Business Technology Platform and integrated with SAP’s intelligent suite and SAP Business Network. “The RISE with SAP offering helps simplify and accelerate our customers’ move to the cloud and will help deliver continuous innovation throughout their journey to become an intelligent enterprise,” said Dr. Uwe Grigoleit, senior vice president and general manager, SAP S/4HANA, SAP. “Together with our strong ecosystem, we will help customers chart a course for their business transformation.” Accenture offers a range of services and assets to help clients move faster and gain more value from SAP S/4HANA. For designing, developing and delivering industry-specific cloud solutions, clients can look to Accenture myConcerto®, an insight-driven platform with intelligent capabilities and pre-configured solutions for industry and business functions. Clients can also use Accenture myWizard® to bolster automation across the end-to-end software engineering lifecycle and drive seamless systems transformation programs with speed, quality and predictability. In April 2020, Accenture was named a Leader and positioned furthest in completeness of vision in Gartner’s 2020 “ Magic Quadrant for SAP S/4HANA® Application Services, Worldwide ”. Accenture was also named a Leader by Forrester in “ The Forrester Wave™: Global SAP Services Providers ”. About Accenture Accenture is a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and security. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries, we offer Strategy and Consulting, Interactive, Technology and Operations services — all powered by the world’s largest network of Advanced Technology and Intelligent Operations centers. Our 514,000 people deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity every day, serving clients in more than 120 countries. We embrace the power of change to create value and shared success for our clients, people, shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at www.accenture.com . Copyright © 2021 Accenture. All rights reserved. Accenture and its logo are trademarks of Accenture. Any statements in this release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties described in SAP’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC), including its most recent annual report on Form 20-F, that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. SAP cautions readers not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements which SAP has no obligation to update and which speak only as of their dates. SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE in Germany and other countries. Please see https://www.sap.com/copyright for additional trademark information and notices. # # # Contact: Julie Bennink Accenture +1 312 693 7301 [email protected]

Accenture Advances SAP IBP for Supply Chain Excellence

The significance of robust supply chain systems cannot be overstated in an ever-evolving business landscape. The recent collaboration between Accenture and SAP is a testament to this, as they unite to revolutionize supply chain management with SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain (SAP IBP). This joint venture aims to bring forth an era of responsible and resilient supply chains vital for modern businesses.

Accenture and SAP’s long-standing partnership has been a harbinger of innovation, combining Accenture’s expertise in business process transformation with SAP’s cutting-edge technology. It can be noted that Accenture integrated its Sustainability Services and extensive industry knowledge with SAP’s intelligent technologies, allowing the two tech giants to create new solutions that enabled enterprises to make significant strides in fully decarbonizing their supply chains and capturing their share of economic growth brought by a circular economy.

Furthermore, SAP and Accenture accelerated the development and delivery of the SAP Responsible Design and Production solution, which was aimed at helping businesses embed sustainability metrics throughout their supply chains, with a particular emphasis on manufacturing and product design. This collaboration has consistently delivered solutions that propel businesses forward, and the current focus on SAP IBP for Supply Chain is no exception.

SAP IBP: A Nerve Center for Supply Chain Excellence

SAP IBP for Supply Chain stands as a nerve center for supply chain operations. It’s designed to enhance visibility and reduce risk while supporting sustainability goals. This solution leverages cloud technology, data analytics, and artificial intelligence to provide comprehensive insights into supply chain dynamics. The goal is to transform raw data into actionable strategies, facilitating better decision-making and aligning with Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) objectives.

Initially, this venture will concentrate on industries like consumer products, high-tech, industrial manufacturing, and automotive. These sectors stand to benefit immensely from the improved transparency and risk management capabilities of SAP IBP.

The SAP IBP solution includes various innovative tools:

• A resilience stress test, co-developed with MIT, identifies potential supply chain failures and financial exposures.
• Digital twin simulation software from Cosmo Tech visualizes supply chain vulnerabilities.
• Accenture’s Enterprise Navigator identifies optimization opportunities across business processes.

Caspar Borggreve, Senior Managing Director at Accenture, emphasizes the need for a digital core powered by cloud, data, and AI to build intelligent, resilient supply chains.

“By collaborating on the supply chain nerve center, and helping SAP develop new capabilities for its SAP IBP solution to accelerate its long-term roadmap, we are enabling organizations reinvent their supply chains to deliver more value,” he explained.

Meanwhile, Dominik Metzger, Head of Digital Supply Chain at SAP, highlights the joint development of new capabilities in SAP IBP as a pathway to enhanced supply chain management.

“Teaming with Accenture on the co-development of new capabilities and functionalities of SAP IBP will help our customers realize a greater return on their investment, while offering significant enhancements to the supply chain nerve center,” Metzger added.

Real-World Impact and Client Success Stories

Accenture and SAP’s collaboration has already transformed supply chains across various industries. Clients have reported increased visibility, optimized resource allocation, and improved production processes. For instance, a global high-tech client achieved better visibility into its supply chain, leading to more efficient production planning.

Moreover, the SAP IBP solution integrates seamlessly with other SAP offerings like SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Business Network, and SAP Analytics Cloud. Its open architecture ensures compatibility with industry solutions from other ecosystem providers, offering a versatile and comprehensive supply chain management tool.

As this partnership evolves, the potential for incorporating generative AI and Large Language Models into SAP IBP is being explored. This advancement could further augment the capabilities of SAP IBP, marking a significant leap in supply chain management technology.

Indeed, the expansion of the Accenture-SAP partnership to develop SAP IBP for Supply Chain represents a significant step toward creating more responsible and resilient supply chains. This collaboration not only addresses current supply chain challenges but also sets a benchmark for future innovations in this domain. The integration of advanced technologies like AI and the focus on key industries also underscores the commitment of both organizations to revolutionize supply chain management. As businesses continue to further navigate a complex and ever-changing global landscape, solutions like SAP IBP for Supply Chain will be pivotal in ensuring operational efficiency and long-term sustainability.

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Accenture and SAP to deliver new supply chain nerve center

Accenture has announced it will expand its partnership with SAP to help organizations reinvent their supply chains with a comprehensive supply chain nerve center that can reduce risk, enhance visibility and support sustainability goals.

The companies will co-develop new capabilities for the SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain (SAP IBP) solution to enhance organizations’ abilities to quickly and cost-effectively respond to changes in supply, demand and inventory.

Through the use of cloud, data, artificial intelligence and analytics, the supply chain nerve center can provide n-tier transparency which allows organizations to identify risks beyond tier one and tier two suppliers, with deeper visibility into their network of suppliers and subcontractors.

The supply chain nerve center turns data into actionable insights and is said to improve decision-making by sensing factors like whether suppliers align with an organization’s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goals.

Featuring assets, accelerators and assessments, the center includes a supply chain resilience stress test to identify potential points of failure, assess related financial exposures and define appropriate mitigation strategies and actions.

Digital twin simulation software from Cosmo Tech gives organizations insight into the vulnerabilities in their supply chain, simulates the behavior of their supply chain under heavy loads and builds mitigation plans throughout their planning process.

In addition, Accenture’s data-driven tool, Enterprise Navigator, identifies where to focus to capture business value, pin-pointing opportunities to standardize across processes, data, people and technology.

Caspar Borggreve, senior managing director and lead, Accenture SAP Business Group, Accenture, said: “To build intelligent and resilient supply chains, organizations need a strong digital core that is powered by the cloud, data and AI.

“By collaborating on the supply chain nerve center, and helping SAP develop new capabilities for its SAP IBP solution, to accelerate its long-term roadmap, we are enabling organizations reinvent their supply chains to deliver more value.”

Dominik Metzger, head of digital supply chain, SAP, said: “Teaming with Accenture on the co-development of new capabilities and functionalities of SAP IBP will help our customers realize a greater return on their investment while offering significant enhancements to the supply chain nerve center.”

Accenture’s supply chain nerve center offering is compatible with other SAP solutions such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Business Network, SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and the SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud solutions.

Accenture Expands Partnership with SAP to Help Clients Establish Responsible and Resilient Supply Chains

Supply chain nerve center helps enhance visibility and reduce risk; Accenture to accelerate development of SAP ®  Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain capabilities

Accenture announced it will collaborate with SAP SE to help organizations reinvent their supply chains with a comprehensive supply chain nerve center that can reduce risk, enhance visibility and support sustainability goals. Additionally, Accenture and SAP plan to co-develop new capabilities for the SAP ®  Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain (SAP IBP) solution to help further enhance an organization’s ability to quickly and cost-effectively respond to changes in supply, demand and inventory.

Using cloud, data, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics, the supply chain nerve center provides n-tier transparency, allowing organizations to identify risks beyond tier one and tier two suppliers by giving deeper visibility into their network of suppliers and subcontractors. It turns data into actionable insights and improves decision-making by sensing factors such as whether suppliers align with an organization’s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goals.

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Accenture has developed more than 30 industry use cases for the supply chain nerve center. Through its recently announced generative AI collaboration with SAP, the company is exploring how generative AI and Large Language Models (LLM) can further augment the solution’s capabilities.

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“To build intelligent and resilient supply chains, organizations need a strong digital core that is powered by the cloud, data and AI,” said Caspar Borggreve, senior managing director and lead, Accenture SAP Business Group, Accenture. “By collaborating on the supply chain nerve center, and helping SAP develop new capabilities for its SAP IBP solution to accelerate its long-term roadmap, we are enabling organizations reinvent their supply chains to deliver more value.”

Accenture and SAP have already collaborated on hundreds of supply chain transformations for clients across industries, using SAP IBP and components of the supply chain nerve center. One global high-tech client is realizing greater visibility into component supply data across its partner ecosystem, enabling it to prioritize its build-plan, optimize resources and improve production. A global consumer products company identified and resolved large risks within its supply chain and enhanced existing business continuity plans after conducting a stress test.

“Teaming with Accenture on the co-development of new capabilities and functionalities of SAP IBP will help our customers realize a greater return on their investment, while offering significant enhancements to the supply chain nerve center,” said Dominik Metzger , Head of Digital Supply Chain, SAP. “Together, we are helping to define an intelligent path to achieve responsible and risk resilient supply chains.”

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In addition to integrating with the SAP IBP solution, Accenture’s supply chain nerve center offering can interface with other SAP solutions such as SAP S/4HANA ®  Cloud, SAP Business Network, SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), and the SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud solutions. Thanks to an open architecture and composable technology approach, the offering integrates with SAP software-compatible industry solutions from other ecosystem providers.

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Consumer-goods companies must transform their planning end to end

The consumer-goods industry has been fending off an array of challenges, such as shifts in consumer expectations and purchasing habits, low GDP growth in some large economies, and a global pandemic that created seismic upheaval. In 2020, the most resilient players were the ones that had already begun rethinking their planning practices.

Those successes are cause for optimism, but existing planning capabilities won’t be sufficient for organizations to keep pace over the next decade. The accumulation of challenges will only make things more difficult for managers of global supply chains and the companies that rely on them. In the current context, supply chains will be called to contribute much more to performance—and that will require a complete reimagining of planning operations, capabilities, company performance, and processes.

The answer: an end-to-end transformation of planning. Technologies such as analytics and machine learning will play a major role, but to be effective they must be supported by new processes, talent, and governance. Companies should start their journey by focusing on five discrete priorities that could generate significant value. The benefits will be well worth the effort.

Pinpointing growth and margin opportunities

A high-performing planning function can provide consumer companies with the ability to capture value across both the top and bottom lines.

Top line: Growth and revenue

In recent years, e-commerce has accounted for 65 percent of growth in the consumer industry. The COVID-19 crisis reshaped the e-commerce landscape by forcing customers to change the way they buy. This trend led to the creation of a number of new “microchannels,” several of which look set to endure beyond the pandemic (Exhibit 1). For instance, the adoption of apps such as DoorDash and Instacart and models such as “buy online, pick up in store” has spiked.

Despite the rapid growth of e-commerce, traditional channels still represent the largest share of sales in the consumer market. Consumer companies have made significant investments in technology, but service levels haven’t improved. They face a number of persistent challenges in this space: increasing customization, greater complexity in the product portfolio, stockouts and missed revenues, and excess inventory. These issues all contribute to a negative customer experience.

Recent events have also placed resilience under the magnifying glass. Over the past 20 years, value chains have become more global, prompting leading companies to develop business-continuity plans. In the second quarter of 2020, we surveyed 60 senior supply-chain executives from across industries and geographies and discovered that a staggering 93 percent of respondents want to increase resilience in their supply chains . The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for more transparent supply chains across industries such as retail, pharmaceuticals, and consumer packaged goods. The few players that had the skills, capabilities, and technology to precisely track SKUs across the supply chain have not only weathered the crisis but have also gained an edge on less-advanced competitors.

Bottom line: Margin and cost

Companies are scrambling to hold down costs and protect margins across several fronts. First, they are facing higher production and logistics costs thanks to the proliferation of SKU portfolios; rising demand for sustainable, organic products and locally sourced fresh goods; and the robust growth of smaller brands, which have expanded three to four times faster than large brands. As a result, costs have risen from lower purchase volumes, manufacturing time has increased from longer changeovers, and less-predictable demand has caused more waste and markdowns.

In addition, the increasingly scattered product portfolio is making end-to-end planning even more critical for organizations seeking to maximize growth and profitability across all planning horizons.

Organizations cannot make optimal decisions without cutting-edge algorithms that can process vast amounts of live data and give planners the insights to react quickly to any change in demand. Finally, most consumer organizations have undertaken ambitious IT transformations that have improved data consistency and accessibility but that have failed to significantly increase planning accuracy or agility. Indeed, many are struggling to generate insights that could deliver superior business value or reduce manual planning efforts.

Establishing a ‘North Star’ for end-to-end planning

Many companies have been making investments in their planning tools and capabilities. Some have made progress in one or even a few areas, but only recently have companies started to tackle planning with the end-to-end perspective needed to significantly elevate performance and address the complex suite of issues. The best-in-class end-to-end planning of the future is built on the following principles:

Cross-functional integration. Companies must manage different planning activities (for example, demand, net requirements, production, and scheduling) in a comprehensive, coordinated way to produce the best decisions for the entire value chain.

Short planning cycles. Traditional monthly planning cycles accelerate to weekly cycles or even continuous-planning processes to enable the agility required in consumer industries.

Advanced-analytics enablement. Advanced analytics helps improve planning quality by, for example, enabling better demand forecasts, production planning, scheduling, and workforce planning.

A high degree of automation. Systems and algorithms support the automation of standard tasks and trigger interventions based on “basic” deviations, allowing planners to focus on exception management and decision making. Tools for automated root-cause identification and the fast, efficient evaluation of alternative actions support planners in their core tasks.

Full supply-chain visibility. Real-time data and performance transparency along the entire supply chain (for example, with inventories and orders) help organizations identify risks and exceptions early on and develop potential countermeasures. In addition, automated scenario-planning capabilities help companies understand the financial implications of potential actions and provide the basis for fact-based, profit-maximizing decisions.

This future state represents a “North Star” for consumer companies. While the end-to-end transformation is aspirational, the required technologies already exist, and companies are making progress across these elements.

Charting a path to value

To unleash maximum value from planning operations, many companies will need to embark on a comprehensive transformation. This effort encompasses several main priorities and embeds the right mix of technology, processes, capabilities, and operating-model changes required to make the journey successful (Exhibit 2).

Focus on business metrics instead of supply-chain key performance indicators: Integrated business planning

Integrated business planning (IBP) builds on real-time financial scenarios that increase the quality of planning decisions as well as the agility of the planning process. Key enablers of efficient IBP are supply-chain and financial planning, system capabilities for real-time scenario creation and evaluation, and machine learning supported by exception identification. IBP is increasingly important for all consumer players, but it is crucial for omnichannel businesses that rely on cross-channel decision making (for example, prioritization decisions in case of bottlenecks). By enabling a coordinated category and product range strategy, companies can make complex trade-offs among pricing, promotions, and availability, a task that is extremely hard to achieve with classic planning systems and capabilities.

An international packaged-food company that was already holding less than 30 days of inventory with service levels above 95 percent embraced this challenge. The company started by cleaning its data to improve availability and transparency and introduced new cross-functional processes to enable data-driven decision making. Through these efforts, it decreased finished-goods inventory by 20 percentage points, improved forecast accuracy by six percentage points, and achieved a threefold increase in response time.

Know what your customer will ask for: Creating a better demand signal

Machine-learning forecasting algorithms use internal and external data sources, as well as their ability to “learn” from historic demand patterns, to continually improve forecast accuracy and minimize manual planning. Leaders harness the capabilities of advanced analytics forecasting tools to strengthen their fact base and close the gap between demand forecasts and commercial targets. Machine-learning algorithms can also simulate the expected impact of sales activities (such as promotions) on demand and help optimize activity management. These tools contribute to an improved customer experience by increasing the availability of the newest offerings. A beverage company built the capabilities to simulate the impact of commercial activities on demand and integrate machine-learning forecasting into its demand-planning processes. The result: an improvement of 13 percentage points in forecast accuracy.

Immediate hands-off order confirmation: No-touch order management

The growth of omnichannel business elevates the importance of automated order-management processes, which give planners the ability to immediately confirm orders—for example, available to promise across planning levels—for optimal stocking based on customer requirements and product availability. Yet side-order management must handle an increased volume of smaller orders. Automation is required to ensure efficient, rapid order processing and allow planners to focus on critical exceptions. As planning becomes more automated and moves toward a touchless operation, it frees up employees to gain new skills so they can focus on more value-adding tasks.

For example, a large consumer-goods distributor developed a stand-alone digital use case to pinpoint inventory position along its supply chain and accurately confirm expected delivery dates and transportation lead times. As a result, client satisfaction rose 30 percentage points.

Break artificial silos between different functions: Automated end-to-end planning

Integrated and highly automated planning processes and systems seamlessly optimize the planning process from demand to production scheduling to deployment. These tools give companies the ability to react in real time to changes in demand or supply exceptions and determine ideal trade-offs among functions. To achieve the greatest impact from advanced demand-sensing solutions, leading consumer-goods players establish automated, end-to-end planning systems to support supply- and inventory-planning agility. That capability allows companies to react to changes in short-term forecasts, manage costs and inventories more effectively, and improve service levels. One leading food company invested in advanced planning capabilities and reduced its inventory by 30 percent while raising customer service levels by three percentage points.

Fix problems before they occur: End-to-end visibility and control

Key elements of a resilient, responsive supply chain include real-time visibility and the early identification and rapid resolution of exceptions (ideally before they have an impact on customers or finances). Service and inventory control towers can help to create transparency, enable fast reactions, and continually address root causes. This visibility is essential to get the right product to the right place at the right time and through the right channel to fulfill customer demand and maximize growth. The COVID-19 pandemic clearly demonstrated the need for transparency across the supply chain, including customers and suppliers. Companies with real-time visibility have been able to react to the disruption much more quickly, make fact-based decisions, and minimize the negative impact on their supply chains—or even gain a competitive advantage.

One home and personal-care company improved customer-service levels by 25 percent through a rapid turnaround of its supply-chain performance. It achieved greater supply-chain visibility by implementing a governance structure (a control tower) that enabled faster response times when identifying exceptions in the supply chain.

Companies with real-time visibility have been able to react to the disruption much more quickly, make fact-based decisions, and minimize the negative impact on their supply chains—or even gain a competitive advantage.

Key success factors in advanced planning transformations

In our experience, a planning transformation is particularly complex. Successful companies must simultaneously manage a large stakeholder base and technological enablement while implementing new ways of working throughout the organization. Executive leadership is a vital component; without the engagement of the top team, any transformation is destined to fail. Business leaders should focus on five actions to accelerate their planning transformation:

• Engage stakeholders beyond the supply chain and the organization. Since the supply chain touches so many different parts of the organization, a successful transformation requires engagement from the CEO and COO. Their presence will lend credence to the transformation and ensure decisions are made in a cross-functional way. A transformation also presents companies with the opportunity to use external data (for example, from retailers, contract manufacturing organizations, copackers, trade partners, and proprietary databases) to generate value for itself and its ecosystem—such as through better visibility on capacity or supply. One company that had a digitally mature procurement function developed an algorithm to predict supply safety, thus improving supply-chain efficiency.
• Develop a plan starting with high-value areas. End-to-end planning transformations run the risk of remaining too conceptual—and therefore difficult to implement. To make efforts more tangible, organizations should select one of the top five use cases and identify its relevance at the granularities of product family, geography, and customer segment (called cells). This exercise enables the development of a portfolio of applications that can be deployed over 12 to 24 months, focusing first on high-impact cells and those with sufficient data. In addition to starting small, organizations should be sure to scale up. One solution is to start with a cell that holds significant business value. Once a sizable flagship has been established and is generating results, the case for scaling can be much easier to make.
• Select the right ecosystem of tech partners. Several tech partners offer advanced integrated solutions, and many start-ups have developed specialized supply-chain offerings—for example, for a specific planning process or industry. While some organizations have specific planning challenges that require customized solutions, executives should start by considering more than one major tech partner. A wider set of candidates can help companies concentrate first on the expected business outcome and then on the technology required to address it.

Reinvent the organization to ensure end-to-end optimization and more agile decision making at interfaces. While advanced planning transformations focus mostly on digital and technology enablement, organizations achieve the greatest planning improvements and efficiency gains through an organization and process redesign. This approach ensures end-to-end decision making in a fit-for-purpose way depending on geography, product segment, channel, and customer type. Indeed, advanced algorithms can solve the most complex issues and identify an optimal solution for the company as a whole. However, this solution can include implications that aren’t beneficial to some individual functions, so organizational setup has to ensure that the resulting actions are executed by all functions to achieve the best outcome.

Organizational changes can take different forms. Radical changes include the creation of a central product organization representing all functions to make optimized trade-offs for a given brand and geography. A less-radical approach is to develop an official network of colleagues in charge of a product or brand while maintaining functional structure. A good way to start is to establish a cross-functional board and ensure it makes decisions based on the recommendations of advanced algorithms. Still, additional elements are required for planning to unlock optimized trade-offs, such as implementing properly aligned incentives for objectives and target functions (for example, by product and channel). In starting such a journey, it is critical to involve key stakeholders in addition to operations, such as sales, marketing, and finance.

• Engage in a massive reskilling program with HR. Planning teams typically still handle a lot of work manually, including consolidating, checking, and reviewing data. As the transformation proceeds, the role of a planning team must evolve to focus more on strategic decision making, trade-offs, and stakeholder engagement. Given the size of the team and the scarcity of those resources in the job market, companies must invest in upskilling as a critical pillar of the planning transformation. In our experience, successful efforts harness techniques such as learning by doing. For example, each individual planner should contribute to the solution design—from business-case creation to delivery—and understand the potential of algorithms to support planning.

How to get started

Companies that want to explore the potential of advanced planning should start by identifying and aligning on a core list of strategic business priorities across their operations and set clear improvement targets for each one. They should then understand how true end-to-end planning across the five priority areas discussed can achieve each of those targets and set a path for the transformation. Finally, they need to devise a clear deployment plan that embeds key success factors across organizational structures, skills, processes, and technologies to make sure that all typical pitfalls are addressed from the start.

Planning activities have traditionally been a supply-chain topic. However, digital and advanced analytics are now unlocking the ability to make complex trade-offs among functions such as sales, production, and the supply chain that will become more critical in the coming years. This dynamic challenges the way companies think about their planning operations and organization. Given the value at stake and the threat posed by digital natives, an advanced planning transformation should be at the top of the agenda for consumer-goods CEOs, and it should focus on five main priorities: integrated business planning, creating a better demand signal, no-touch order management, automated end-to-end planning, and end-to-end visibility and control.

Jérémie Ghandour is an associate partner in McKinsey’s Paris office, Tim Lange is a partner in the Cologne office, Andreas Seyfert is a senior expert in the Berlin office, and Alessandro Turco is an associate partner in the Milan office.

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Being prepared, ready and resilient

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Call for change

While risk is a fact of life for any business, there are times when even those that have learned to expect the unexpected can be taken by surprise. Accenture’s approach to business resilience demonstrates that, with the right plans, processes and people in place, it is possible to be ready for anything.

Business continuity can be affected by many different situations. From natural disasters to cybersecurity incidents, civil unrest to turbulent financial markets—not to mention unexpected health and humanitarian events such as the global pandemic—businesses are under pressure to minimize disruption and be more resilient.

Accenture’s experience of managing disruption is based on years of preparedness. We have introduced intelligent tools that enable us to be agile and adapt, with robust plans that validate and recalibrate our approach so that we can be prepared for whatever comes our way.

But it’s not all about preparation. We have changed the way we manage and deliver services, internally and externally, to counter shockwaves of change. And we have invested in technologies and enabled a digital workforce so that we are flexible and ready to make the impossible, possible.

Any business is only as resilient as its weakest link. With a robust business resilience capability embedded across the organization, we can not only continue to serve our clients but also work with them to help them do the same.

"We are prepared for the worst by being ready with the best of our systems and services—not forgetting our people performing on their best day, every day." — MARGARET SMITH , Senior Managing Director and Executive Director – Corporate Services & Sustainability and Business Operations, Accenture

When tech meets human ingenuity

Our business resilience strategy supports how we operate as a company, starting with our global client base of leading household names, underpinned by our internal functions (such as Global Asset Protection, Travel, Procurement, Workplace, Technology , Finance , Information Security , Legal and Human Resources) and supported by the collaborations of our third-party ecosystem.

With a business landscape that is constantly changing, it’s important to make sure that technologies are working in harmony with our people so that we can align to industry leading practices and overcome challenges.

The focus of our global approach includes first to be prepared so challenges do not overwhelm our organization. We take steps to secure the safety and well-being of our people who, in turn, embrace the business resilience program through education and ongoing awareness. We ensure that continuity plans are developed consistently and integrated with response and crisis processes. Exercises are used to validate our plans. A range of exercise scenarios (including pandemic) are performed at least annually, and results capture improvement actions so that the implemented strategy remains effective. 

Second, we are ready by identifying priorities and making sure we are able to respond if threats become a reality. Accenture resilience processes support robust emergency response and crisis management. Preventative and contingency measures are taken to minimize the impact on people and services. Our operational teams identify essential and business-critical processes for vital functions such as employee payroll and supply chain to keep goods moving. And our Global Asset Protection team offers 24/7 monitoring to keep pace with changing conditions around the world.

Finally, we focus on being resilient in the long term. We are proactive, with sustainable plans that mitigate the impact of volatility, backed by strong leadership, integrated processes and ongoing collaboration.

In addition, our business resilience programs are supported by policies and we align methods to industry standards and practices so we can grow and evolve our capabilities relevant to the changes around us.

Like many global organizations, Accenture depends on a range of activities being performed extensively across Accenture’s locations around the world. For example,  70% of our Finance team’s services  are performed in  intelligent operations  centers and many involve complex accounting, business and tax advisory activities—making business continuity a priority.

We rely on the simplicity, automation and preparedness that comes from technology transformation. For example, we have deployed cloud-based business resilience management software that sits on the Salesforce platform and provides greater analytics and insights.

In this way, we invest in and draw on best-in class technologies to automate and integrate, so that we can work faster and smarter. And also, we make sure we realize the full value from these technologies, so that we can disrupt and innovate the processes that we run to help future-proof our business.

"Our dedicated professionals are working across our business to drive out leading practices—the bedrock of being prepared, ready and resilient." — ERIN HARRIS , Managing Director – Corporate Services & Sustainability, Business Resiliency Services, Accenture

Our strategy Three core plans make up the business resilience program:

Business continuity focuses on developing and implementing processes to support continued business operations. Accenture employs a range of capabilities to support business continuity planning that use our own methodology, following industry guidelines and standards. We undertake standardized analysis and reviews to identify critical business processes and the resources they rely on. We develop and implement solutions based on risks and requirements, conducting training (in-house and with vendors) and maintaining and measuring compliance.

Technology continuity focuses on the technology required to continue mission-critical systems. Our capabilities to support technology continuity include geographic distributions of data centers and service providers across multiple locations, data backup to maintain data integrity, specialist support teams with 24x7x365 coverage, standardized processes and testing and exercising programs to validate effectiveness.

Crisis management focuses on Accenture people and facilities—preventing, mitigating, preparing for, responding to and recovering from conditions that threaten life, property, or operations. Our people are our first priority—but in taking care of our people, we are also taking care of our business continuity for our clients. Accenture supports crisis management with dedicated teams; for example, the Global Asset Protection team was a huge part of our early and swift response to the global pandemic, setting up a Pandemic Task Force in China and surrounding areas in January 2020. We also created a global people emergency communication system and a 24x7 Accenture Security Operations Center (ASOC)—a global watch program to advise our people on safety, security, health and travel and specialist risk intelligence that is shared across the world.

In the past 15 years, we have seen many extreme events in various corners of the world that had the potential to seriously impact business continuity. From the volcanic ash eruption in Iceland that caused enormous disruption to air travel across western and northern Europe in 2010, to a major hurricane in the United States in 2016 or a global cyberattack in 2017, we have seen and dealt with our fair share of crises. In each situation, our crisis management teams were not only prepared to handle the event, but also skilled in understanding the specific needs of those circumstances, through effective collaboration, agile response and being able to manage uncertainty.

One of the areas of specialty that has proved especially helpful in the last year has been our team handling infectious disease outbreaks. Accenture has a global Infectious Disease Plan (IDP) which provides preventative measures and recommends pre-planning for, and responses to, situations such as COVID-19.

The plan includes inputs from leading health authorities (such as the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and respective regional and local health agencies. We adjust global and location actions based on developing situations and support regional and local business resilience teams following a defined crisis management process.

As a result, our ability to manage the fallout from the pandemic was eased by a robust and well-informed team. It was able to put in place the plans and people to deliver a timely and response that was right for us and our business. For instance, we enabled 95% of Accenture people to work from home, including 350,000 delivery center people, while completing 42 acquisitions and establishing 100 Return to Office Workplace protocols.

"Now, our corporate functions and client projects can manage disruption using their business continuity assessments and plans—enabling end-to-end business resilience." — PENELOPE PRETT , Chief Information, Data & Analytics Officer, Accenture

A valuable difference

Accenture uses multiple methods to support business resilience. But at the heart lies our strategies around people (running award-winning learning programs on remote working), infrastructure (deploying uninterrupted power supplies and secure connectivity) and technology (providing soft phones and privacy screens).

Our business continuity planning isn’t limited to how we provide our client services. We also bake in business continuity for our functions and facilities that support those client services. With such a comprehensive, end-to-end strategy in place, we can realize business resilience for more than a single corporate function. We include every aspect of how we operate, serve and run—and are able to do all those things quickly and easily.

Two elements are helping us to respond in such an agile manner. First, we have modified our technology approach toward a “one person, one machine” strategy. This means we have 721,000 people, all using workstations and mobiles that can communicate securely and reliably in every corner of the world.

Second, Accenture IT infrastructure  runs in the hybrid cloud . That not only means we’re saving cost by spending half as much as our legacy delivery models, but also gives us new IT potential through flexible and resilient capabilities.

Above all, we are successful in executing business resilience because we work together, better than ever. We bring together specialists in various disciplines across the organization to deliver an integrated, cross-functional strategy and enjoy the shared success of a more robust, resilient business.

What we do for clients We use the same framework that we use for ourselves to support resilience for our clients. We are able to apply lessons learned around agile workforces and flexible plans to support clients’ business continuity.

Accenture’s agility-first approach includes three core options that help businesses be more resilient:

Remote work

An agile workforce that is able to work remotely. What’s involved? The workforce must use laptops. Connectivity over the public internet must be possible. Security controls, public services stability and regulations will all influence remote working.

Redirect work

A distributed workforce that provides location resilience. What’s involved? Multiple locations need to be used for service delivery and time zones taken into account. Languages, skills and access to applications need to be agreed when the plan is activated.

Relocate work

A flexible workforce that is able to physically move from one location to another. What’s involved? Only used when Remote and Redirect is not an option. Involves laptop-enabled users for greater agility and consideration of physical security controls (restricted work area vs open area).

Continuity from collaboration

A combination of resilience options could offer a more agile response and continuity of services; for example, combining remote and redirect or redirect and relocate.

The Accenture business resilience program is aligned to the industry standards (ISO22301, ISO20000, ISO 27001) and certified in all India and Philippines locations, plus the China and United Kingdom Advanced Technology Centers.

Although we recognize that no one can guarantee 100% continuity in the event of a crisis due to the uncertain nature of situations, we have seen that bringing together effective collaboration with robust continuity plans is helping our organization to not only build resilience, but also help our clients to manage change.

Business resilience professionals around the globe supporting our clients

Clients supported globally

Countries supported with business continuity plans

Continuity plans implemented

Meet the team

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These teams are enabling innovation, growth and business continuity for Accenture.

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Accenture’s cloud migration sets standard for other large businesses

Embracing its mantra of “let there be change,” accenture embarked on an ambitious journey to transform both its technology landscape and its workforce..

Accenture was going through a period most companies would envy. 

The Dublin-based, global professional services leader had grown significantly organically and inorganically, including expanding into diverse businesses, propelled by $14 billion invested in more than 177 acquisitions in the last five years. As the company grew and expanded into new markets and services, its legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system became increasingly complex, costly, and inflexible. Accenture needed a more agile, scalable, and innovative platform to support its dynamic and diverse business needs.

As Eli Lambert, Managing Director of Accenture’s Global IT Finance Platforms, noted, “a significant challenge for a large IT enterprise is keeping up with the speed of business and ahead of technology change. Large enterprises often have expansive landscapes, with legacy systems that stand in the way of speed, agility, and innovation.” 

Embracing its mantra of “Let there be change,” the company embarked on an ambitious journey to transform both its technology landscape and its workforce.

‘Rising’ to transformation

Accenture has been a long-standing partner of SAP, using its ERP solutions to manage its core business processes, such as finance and procurement. As they embarked on their transformation journey, the company once again partnered with SAP to migrate to RISE with SAP, a live cloud service utilized by companies spanning 26 industries and more than 100 countries.

RISE with SAP combines SAP S/4HANA, the intelligent cloud ERP solution, with SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), the integrated platform for data, analytics, integration, and extension, as well as other services, such as cloud infrastructure, application management, and business process intelligence.

By moving to RISE with SAP, Accenture was able to simplify its IT landscape, reduce its total cost of ownership, and gain access to the latest innovations and best practices from SAP.  Further, consuming RISE with SAP as a managed service allowed Accenture Global IT to reduce required night and weekend support by 60 percent, enhancing employee work/life balance, and led to valuable upskilling for 50 percent of the retained IT team. 

Cloud mindset and composable architecture era

Building upon the move to  RISE with SAP , Accenture adopted a modern digital core strategy, which centers on keeping its core ERP system as standard and as simple as possible, using SAP BTP to extend and enhance its capabilities, and anchoring to a cloud mindset for both IT and business professionals. This approach allows Accenture to avoid unnecessary customizations and modifications in its SAP platform, which can create complexity, risk, and technical debt, and instead focus on delivering value-added solutions.

Since the strategy was introduced, 21 percent of the platform’s custom code has been removed, improving performance and reducing overhead. Beyond that, re-solutioning legacy custom code to leverage extensibility has provided its own benefits.

Leveraging SAP BTP, a cash application scheduler was developed to improve integration; now the integration runs 77 percent faster, and the already successful SAP Cash Application solution has even greater results – auto-clearing of cash application has now doubled since the solution was introduced and increased a further 7 percent with the scheduler activation.

Another key solution that Accenture uses to implement its clean digital core strategy is SAP Profitability and Performance Management (PaPM), a cloud-native application that runs on SAP BTP and enables advanced profitability analysis, performance measurement, and optimization. The use of SAP PaPM for Corporate Allocations “streamlined and reduced risk in delivering financial results,” said Lisa Pearson, director of the company’s Management Reporting Process.  “It also gave us transparency and control of our processes and calculations while also eliminating manual actions – valuable benefits our previous custom solution could not offer.”  

The solution now runs 50 percent faster with greater traceability.

Earlier this year, Accenture’s RISE with SAP and clean digital core journey led to the company being celebrated as a winner in the “Business Innovator” category at the  2024 SAP Innovation Awards , an annual ceremony honoring organizations using SAP technologies to make the world run better. 

And this is only the beginning, Lambert said, with employees “freed up to focus on future-proofing our processes and technology by consuming cloud capabilities enabled by” the revolutionary platform. 

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Integrated Business Planning

For integrating functional plans, deploying business strategy, and driving business management, what is integrated business planning (ibp).

Integrated Business Planning (IBP) is a common-sense process designed for effective decision-making and led by your leadership team. True business integration means senior management can plan and manage the entire organization over a 24-36 month horizon, aligning strategic and tactical plans each month, and allocating critical resources, people, equipment, inventory, materials, time, and money; to satisfy your customers in the most profitable way.

Integrated Business Planning represents the evolution of Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) from the supply and demand balancing process developed in the early 1980s. Today it is a process that drives the alignment of all functions across an organization, models and creates readiness for alternate outcomes, drives deployment of strategy, and enhances collaboration across supply chains.

What is the difference between S&OP and IBP?

There are many differences between Sales & Operations Planning and Integrated Business Planning, but firstly it’s important to note that IBP is not a supply chain process ; it has a much broader reach. IBP is the process that connects your strategy and business plan to ensure both are delivered.

The purpose of IBP is not to drive a better forecast with which supply chain can plan. It is the process that brings focus to the deployment of your business strategy and provides a framework for effective decision-making to drive growth.

It's also much more than just a monthly meeting. IBP is a company framework to surface and solve problems and continually re-optimize plans as circumstances change. IBP enables businesses to create an aligned, cross-functional plan for the future, based upon key assumptions. These assumptions, documented and updated each month, are based on insights.

Read our white paper to learn more about what sets Integrated Business Planning apart from Sales & Operations Planning.

Looking for help with IBP software?

Oliver Wight IBP Powered by Board is a holistic solution combining Oliver Wight's industry-leading Class A and implementation change management processes with Board software. Fully align people, processes, and technology and embed IBP and its benefits for years to come.

This offering combines IBP technology and process in one package for rapid time to value. You will benefit from Oliver Wight consulting and education + Board Intelligent Planning Platform + specialist implementation services. 

Find out more.

How mature is your organization's true level of maturity in IBP?

Before embarking on any performance improvement program, it is imperative to identify your organization's true level of maturity. The Oliver Wight Maturity Model characterizes an organization as being in one of four key phases of maturity: Co-ordination, Business Process Control, Automation, or Integration. Assess your business maturity in Integrated Business Planning using our free online self-assessment tool .

Assess your business maturity

How you can benefit from Integrated Business Planning

Early identification of gaps in the business plan and strategy deployment, creating time to close them

An integrated view of performance and projection of your business over a 24-36 month horizon

Alignment of functional operating plans and financial projections with ‘one set of numbers’

Application of scenario planning and modelling to areas of your business where there may be uncertainty or impact

Increased responsiveness to uncertainties and unplanned events to minimize negative impacts and seize opportunities

Creation of transparency and clear accountability across the business/organization

Simplification of the budgeting or annual planning process

Integration of strategy deployment with operational plans

Increased employee engagement and efficiency

Growth in revenue

Reduced costs

Improved customer service

Reduced inventory

Visibility of planned product changes, future demand from sales and marketing, supply chain performance, planned supply chain capability and flexibility, plus bottom-up plans and the actions and decisions required to deliver ‘best for business' outcomes

You should consider Integrated Business Planning for your business if:

You are constantly in ‘fire-fighting’ mode

You have a misaligned management team

You are continually missing the financial plan

You are experiencing rapid growth and can no longer manage effectively using an informal process

Your budgeting process is ‘painful’

You are struggling to get on top of service issues

You cannot keep up with growth in demand

You have excessive inventory

You are experiencing excessive rework and cost

Departments or sites are working in silos

There is no ‘single source of truth’ or ‘single set of numbers’ to run the business

You feel like you never have time to look at the strategy

There is poor deployment and execution of the strategic plan

You have poor employee engagement

You feel like you are not getting a return on the effort put into your existing S&OP/IBP process

How we can help

A diagnostic assessment of your current S&OP or IBP process, including its effectiveness and identifying any performance issues

Transfer of our knowledge to your people so they can create and manage an effective IBP process

Change management – plan, monitor, and support the implementation of change and its impact on your people

Facilitate the design of an IBP process to best fit your organization and its needs

Scoping of an action plan to address issues and take advantage of the opportunities identified, including resourcing, timelines, and performance improvement expectations

Coach IBP process users as you introduce the new ways of working

Assess and validate that your IBP process has achieved a Class A level of effectiveness – firmly embedded as the ‘way you do things’ and delivering the benefits you wanted

Integrated Business Planning is a cutting edge process which creates cross-functional alignment and enables businesses to re-focus to meet the ever-changing environment. IBP generates readiness for alternative outcomes, enhances collaboration, and ultimately drives deployment of strategy in an uncertain world. The chosen process of some of the world’s most progressive and best-known organizations, IBP is a common-sense process that maximizes profit and enables leaders to manage risk with confidence.

Integrated business planning resources to help you improve.

White papers & case studies

Videos & webinars

Get in touch

Upcoming courses.

11 Jun 2024

Virtual (English)

Integrated Business Planning – Introduction, Overview, and Current Best Practice

More information +

10 Sep 2024

08 Oct 2024

Virtual (French)

French Integrated Business Planning Workshop

12 Nov 2024

Latest white papers & case studies

Deploying Strategy with Integrated Business Planning – The Supply Review

Deploying Strategy with Integrated Business Planning – The Integrated Reconciliation Review

Deploying Strategy with Integrated Business Planning – The Demand Review

Deploying Strategy with Integrated Business Planning - The Portfolio Review

The IBP advantage: a roadmap for marketing and product teams to collaboratively deliver success

Doom looms or opportunity awaits

Deploying Strategy with Integrated Business Planning - Connecting Strategy to Execution

Assumptions Management Part 2: Structural Integrity

Navigating the decision: behavior, empowerment, and integration to support the information revolution

From complexity to simplicity: The power of aligning people, process, and technology

Assumptions Management Part 1: Controlling your future in an uncertain world

Five key factors to speed up your successful IBP journey: Intelligent solutions meet your integrated process.

Latest books

The Transition from Sales and Operations Planning to Integrated Business Planning - Second Edition

The Oliver Wight Class A Standard for Business Excellence

Le Standard Classe A d’Oliver Wight pour l’Excellence en Entreprise

Der Class A Standard für Business Excellence nach Oliver Wight

El Estándar de Clase A para la Excelencia Empresarial de Oliver Wight

Orchestrating Success: Improve Control of the Business with Sales & Operations Planning

Enterprise Sales and Operations Planning

An Executive's Guide to Achieving Class A Business Excellence

Latest videos and webinars

Balancing planning (ibp) and execution (itp) in rapidly changing socioeconomic environments.

Flavio Pietrocola, Oliver Wight Partner, explains how to find the right balance between Planning (IBP) and Execution (ITP) in this disruptive and rapidly changing world.

How to steer a company through the D-VUCAD world? (in German)

This podcast episode discusses how to steer companies through volatile, unpredictable times and what modern control instruments and technologies there are that companies should use.

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Oliver Wight Partner, Gary Connors explains the five common failure modes in implementing Integrated Business Planning and how to manage changes through IBP.

Moving to E2E Supply Chain Management with IBP coordination

Watch the video to see Oliver Wight's CEO Les Brookes explains how to drive End-to-End supply chain transformation with IBP.

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Oliver Wight Partner, Dawn Dent spoke to Eminox's Managing Director Mark Runciman, who shares his experience of working with Oliver Wight.

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Press Release Details

Nvidia nim revolutionizes model deployment, now available to transform world’s millions of developers into generative ai developers.

• 150+ Partners Across Every Layer of AI Ecosystem Embedding NIM Inference Microservices to Speed Enterprise AI Application Deployments From Weeks to Minutes
• NVIDIA Developer Program Members Gain Free Access to NIM for Research, Development and Testing

TAIPEI, Taiwan, June 02, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- COMPUTEX -- NVIDIA today announced that the world’s 28 million developers can now download NVIDIA NIM ™ — inference microservices that provide models as optimized containers — to deploy on clouds, data centers or workstations, giving them the ability to easily build generative AI applications for copilots, chatbots and more, in minutes rather than weeks.

These new generative AI applications are becoming increasingly complex and often utilize multiple models with different capabilities for generating text, images, video, speech and more. NVIDIA NIM dramatically increases developer productivity by providing a simple, standardized way to add generative AI to their applications.

NIM also enables enterprises to maximize their infrastructure investments. For example, running Meta Llama 3-8B in a NIM produces up to 3x more generative AI tokens on accelerated infrastructure than without NIM. This lets enterprises boost efficiency and use the same amount of compute infrastructure to generate more responses.

Nearly 200 technology partners — including Cadence, Cloudera , Cohesity , DataStax , NetApp , Scale AI and Synopsys — are integrating NIM into their platforms to speed generative AI deployments for domain-specific applications, such as copilots, code assistants and digital human avatars. Hugging Face is now offering NIM — starting with Meta Llama 3 .

“Every enterprise is looking to add generative AI to its operations, but not every enterprise has a dedicated team of AI researchers,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Integrated into platforms everywhere, accessible to developers everywhere, running everywhere — NVIDIA NIM is helping the technology industry put generative AI in reach for every organization.”

Enterprises can deploy AI applications in production with NIM through the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform. Starting next month, members of the NVIDIA Developer Program can access NIM for free for research, development and testing on their preferred infrastructure.

40+ NIM Microservices Power Gen AI Models Across Modalities NIM containers are pre-built to speed model deployment for GPU-accelerated inference and can include NVIDIA CUDA ® software, NVIDIA Triton Inference Server ™ and NVIDIA TensorRT™-LLM software.

Over 40 NVIDIA and community models are available to experience as NIM endpoints on ai.nvidia.com , including Databricks DBRX , Google’s open model Gemma, Meta Llama 3, Microsoft Phi-3, Mistral Large, Mixtral 8x22B and Snowflake Arctic.

Developers can now access NVIDIA NIM microservices for Meta Llama 3 models from the Hugging Face AI platform. This lets developers easily access and run the Llama 3 NIM in just a few clicks using Hugging Face Inference Endpoints, powered by NVIDIA GPUs on their preferred cloud.

Enterprises can use NIM to run applications for generating text, images and video, speech and digital humans. With NVIDIA BioNeMo ™ NIM microservices for digital biology, researchers can build novel protein structures to accelerate drug discovery.

Dozens of healthcare companies are deploying NIM to power generative AI inference across a range of applications, including surgical planning, digital assistants, drug discovery and clinical trial optimization.

With new NVIDIA ACE NIM microservices , developers can easily build and operate interactive, lifelike digital humans in applications for customer service, telehealth, education, gaming and entertainment.

Hundreds of AI Ecosyst em Partners Embedding NIM Platform providers including Canonical , Red Hat , Nutanix and VMware (acquired by Broadcom) are supporting NIM on open-source KServe or enterprise solutions. AI application companies Hippocratic AI , Glean , Kinetica and Redis are also deploying NIM to power generative AI inference.

Leading AI tools and MLOps partners — including Amazon SageMaker, Microsoft Azure AI, Dataiku, DataRobot, deepset , Domino Data Lab, LangChain , Llama Index , Replicate , Run.ai, Saturn Cloud , Securiti AI and Weights & Biases — have also embedded NIM into their platforms to enable developers to build and deploy domain-specific generative AI applications with optimized inference.

Global system integrators and service delivery partners Accenture, Deloitte, Infosys, Latentview , Quantiphi , SoftServe, TCS and Wipro have created NIM competencies to help the world’s enterprises quickly develop and deploy production AI strategies.

Enterprises can run NIM-enabled applications virtually anywhere, including on NVIDIA-Certified Systems ™ from global infrastructure manufacturers Cisco, Dell Technologies , Hewlett-Packard Enterprise , Lenovo and Supermicro, as well as server manufacturers ASRock Rack , ASUS , GIGABYTE , Ingrasys , Inventec , Pegatron , QCT, Wistron and Wiwynn. NIM microservices have also been integrated into Amazon Web Services , Google Cloud , Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure .

Titans of Industry Amp Up Gener ative AI With NIM Industry leaders Foxconn, Pegatron, Amdocs , Lowe’s, ServiceNow and Siemens are among the businesses using NIM for generative AI applications in manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, retail, customer service and more:

• Foxconn — the world’s largest electronics manufacturer — is using NIM in the development of domain-specific LLMs embedded into a variety of internal systems and processes in its AI factories for smart manufacturing, smart cities and smart electric vehicles.
• Pegatron — a Taiwanese electronics manufacturing company — is leveraging NIM for Project TaME, a Taiwan Mixtral of Experts model designed to advance the development of local LLMs for industries.
• Amdocs — a leading global provider of software and services to communications and media companies — is using NIM to run a customer billing LLM that significantly lowers the cost of tokens, improves accuracy by up to 30% and reduces latency by 80%, driving near real-time responses.
• Lowe’s — a FORTUNE ® 50 home improvement company — is using generative AI for a variety of use cases. For example, the retailer is leveraging NVIDIA NIM inference microservices to elevate experiences for associates and customers.
• ServiceNow — the AI platform for business transformation — announced earlier this year that it was one of the first platform providers to access NIM to enable fast, scalable and more cost-effective LLM development and deployment for its customers. NIM microservices are integrated within the Now AI multimodal model and are available to customers that have ServiceNow’s generative AI experience, Now Assist, installed.
• Siemens — a global technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transport and healthcare — is integrating its operational technology with NIM microservices for shop floor AI workloads. It is also building an on-premises version of its Industrial Copilot for Machine Operators using NIM.

Availability Developers can experiment with NVIDIA microservices at ai.nvidia.com at no charge. Enterprises can deploy production-grade NIM microservices with NVIDIA AI Enterprise running on NVIDIA-Certified Systems and leading cloud platforms. Starting next month, members of the NVIDIA Developer Program will gain free access to NIM for research and testing.

Watch Huang’s COMPUTEX keynote to learn more about NVIDIA NIM.

About NVIDIA NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in accelerated computing.

For further information, contact: Anna Kiachian NVIDIA Corporation +1-650-224-9820 [email protected]

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: the benefits, impact, performance, features, and availability of NVIDIA’s products and technologies, including NVIDIA NIM, NVIDIA CUDA, NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM software, NVIDIA Developer program, NVIDIA BioNeMo, NVIDIA-Certified Systems, and NVIDIA AI Enterprise; our collaborations and partnerships with third parties and the benefits and impacts thereof; third parties using or adopting our products or technologies; every enterprise looking to add generative AI to its operations; and NVIDIA NIM helping the technology industry put generative AI in reach for every organization are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: global economic conditions; our reliance on third parties to manufacture, assemble, package and test our products; the impact of technological development and competition; development of new products and technologies or enhancements to our existing product and technologies; market acceptance of our products or our partners' products; design, manufacturing or software defects; changes in consumer preferences or demands; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems; as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the most recent reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, including, but not limited to, its annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on the company's website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

© 2024 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, BioNeMo, CUDA, NVIDIA NIM, NVIDIA Triton Inference Server and TensorRT are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. Features, pricing, availability and specifications are subject to change without notice.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at: https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/4fe99b19-66e7-4473-b9ff-f1380eae0ff8

NVIDIA NIM revolutionizes model deployment for every layer of the AI ecosystem.

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