How to shift from monthly S&OP to continuous IBP

Supply chain leaders today face a steep mountain of challenges. And it's a moving mountain, with things changing at a moment's notice. Geopolitical uncertainty, a disrupted global supply chain, and complex regulations have made planning tougher than ever. How can your organization make almost instant, yet fully informed, operational decisions?

Monthly sales and operations planning (S&OP) falls short of what's needed. Organizations are slow to respond to changing market conditions due to a reliance on manual data entry, disconnected systems, and infrequent planning cycles. This environment leads to data discrepancies, obscured visibility, and poor collaboration across the supply chain. Rather than making proactive, strategic decisions in the face of market shifts, organizations are left fighting execution-related fires and miss their window of opportunity.

To thrive in today’s environment, you need a continuous, integrated, and agile approach to supply chain planning that connects operations with strategy and finance. IBP provides all this — and more — and it's about to become easier than ever to introduce to your organization.

The challenges of traditional S&OP

S&OP has traditionally struggled to deliver on its promise of true cross-functional alignment, often due to legacy systems and fragmented data. Previous attempts to improve S&OP processes have typically focused on working around the technical limitations of the time — patching together spreadsheets, relying on siloed tools, and forcing consensus through manual coordination.

These efforts failed to address the root causes of misalignment: a lack of shared data context, disjointed planning cycles, and inconsistent assumptions across teams. The result was a process that talks about collaboration but rarely achieves it — because it starts with the symptoms, not the source.

Here are some of the most common downsides of manual or disconnected supply chain processes:

• Infrequent planning: Planning in a monthly cadence makes reconciliation with execution-level plans and strategic plans a challenge.

• Lack of strategic alignment: Operational decisions often don’t align with overarching financial and business goals.

• Disjointed handoffs: Miscommunication and lack of coordination between teams lead to inefficiencies and delays.

• Slow response times: Fragmented data makes it difficult to react quickly to market shifts, which ultimately leaves money on the table.

• Missed opportunities: Without visibility into real-time market trends and internal performance, you miss chances to optimize resources and seize new opportunities.

A complete IBP solution provides end-to-end oversight, ensuring every aspect of the supply chain is covered and aligned. From forecasting to product portfolio planning, demand planning to inventory management, an advanced IBP solution integrates all these operational processes into a unified, connected system. 

Ready-to-deploy, cross-functional collaboration

Anaplan’s new IBP application isn’t just another tool — it’s a market-defining leap forward, purpose-built to capitalize on our unique strengths in connected planning, real-time data integration, and scalability. 

Unlike solutions that retrofit capabilities for IBP, Anaplan was designed with connected planning at its core. With intelligent, out-of-the-box configurations, seamless integrations, and embedded best practices, Anaplan’s IBP application empowers business leaders to unify operational and financial planning in ways that were previously impossible. 

We transform fragmented planning into a dynamic, transparent process where real-time decision-making, scenario evaluation, and integrated process orchestration fuel not just efficiency, but growth. Only Anaplan delivers this level of agility and alignment at enterprise scale, making it the clear foundation for the future of IBP.

This ensures that:

• Continuous, real-time planning replaces static monthly reviews, enabling faster, more informed decisions based on current realities, not outdated snapshots.

• Operational, strategic, and long-range plans are in sync, ensuring every decision supports overarching business goals. 

• Financial implications are no longer an afterthought. They’re built into operational choices from the start. 

• Planning handoffs are streamlined and predictable, with coordinated workflows that keep teams aligned and timelines on track. 

• Planners gain end-to-end visibility, unlocking opportunities to optimize capacity, reduce risk, and drive performance. 

Each capability is designed to work seamlessly with domain-specific features, guided configurators, and pre-built data models that make setup intuitive and implementation fast. 

By combining best-practice content with powerful scenario analysis tools, the application reduces complexity and drives results from day one. Unlike other tools that focus primarily on data collection, Anaplan drives both the data and the process, enabling true collaboration across the business. 

As conditions shift, the platform remains fully upgradable and customizable, scaling effortlessly while supporting continuous, timely decision-making that helps you not just manage data, but actively manage the business. 

Agility in the face of unpredictability

There’s no going back. Today’s supply chains face constant disruption, and yesterday’s planning tools simply weren’t built for the pace, complexity, or interconnectedness of modern business.

IBP is the answer, but only Anaplan delivers it at the speed, scale, and intelligence the world now demands. Anaplan’s IBP application combines out-of-the-box functionality, best practices, and advanced modeling tools in a single, connected platform, empowering you to move from reactive to proactive, from siloed to synchronized.

This is more than a solution — it’s a shift.

Legacy tools weren’t built for this. Only Anaplan is ushering in a new era of planning.  Now is the time to transform your planning, accelerate profitability, and build resilience in a market that requires agility at every turn.