Making Integrated Business Planning Pay Off: Bridging Supply, Demand, and Finance

BOSTON, MA--(Marketwire - January 13, 2009) - Today, Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE: HHS), announced the release of a new benchmark report, "Making Integrated Business Planning Pay Off: Bridging Supply, Demand, and Finance." This report examines the missing link between supply chain, product management and finance professionals that leads to sub-optimal decisions and outlines the roadmap for an Integrated Business Planning process. The key value proposition associated with the IBP process is being able to look at both the revenues as well as cost in a holistic fashion in order to improve company profitability. To obtain a complimentary copy of the report, visit: http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?cid=5367.

Surveying 129 enterprises, Aberdeen found that the need to meet top-line expectations and reduce supply chain costs is making Integrated Business Planning (IBP) an imperative. Seventy-two percent (72%) of survey respondents indicate they are either moderately or severely negatively impacted by current recessionary conditions. The S&OP process has tended to be more focused on costs, as that is the metric that the supply chain operations organization has control over. IBP initiatives can serve as an urgent call to action for organizations to shed siloed approaches to manage revenue and costs. However this also means that more organizations such as product management, finance and marketing are involved in addition to the traditional Sales and Operations roles which can make the process difficult to implement unless a phased approach is taken.

A maturity framework for Integrated Business Planning is unveiled as part of this benchmark report that is designed to allow companies to benchmark their current status with respect to S&OP processes and create a roadmap to evolve into the IBP process. Several case studies are explored in this report including: a case study on pricing integration with the IBP process, product management role within the IBP process and the role of customer within the IBP process.

The key performance metrics where the Best-in-Class outperform their Industry Average and Laggard peers are: year-over-year change in Return on Net Assets (RONA); year-over-year change in Gross Margin; cash conversion cycle; customer service levels, and; forecast accuracy at the product family level.

Some of the characteristics that distinguish the Best-in-Class companies are:

--  6 times as likely as all others to have the ability to model pricing
    as a parameter to shape demand
--  7 times as likely as all others to have the ability to proactively
    monitor daily performance against IBP metrics
--  2.5 times as likely as all others to have the ability to enable
    feedback from the financial planning and budgeting process to the S&OP
    process
    

"Financial modeling needs to be very deep in order to properly consider and evaluate impact on working capital, profits, cash flow and other financial metrics," states Nari Viswanathan, principal analyst, Aberdeen. "In addition, the financial modeling needs to replicate the company's reporting structure in order to feed directly into the budgeting and planning process including modeling multi-currency, differential tax rates and partial ownership situations. Consideration of pricing, service policy and promotions as a key driver of demand and being able to integrate the product management organization within the IBP process."

A complimentary copy of this report is made available due in part by the following underwriters: Kinaxis and River Logic. To obtain a complimentary copy of the report, visit: http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?cid=5367.

For additional access to complimentary Supply Chain Management Research, please visit http://research.aberdeen.com/index.php/-supply-chain-management

About Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company

Aberdeen is a leading provider of fact-based research and market intelligence that delivers demonstrable results. Having benchmarked more than 30,000 companies in the past two years, Aberdeen is uniquely positioned to educate users to action: driving market awareness, creating demand, enabling sales, and delivering meaningful return-on-investment analysis. As the trusted advisor to the global technology markets, corporations turn to Aberdeen™ for insights that drive decisions.

As a Harte-Hanks Company, Aberdeen plays a key role of putting content in context for the global direct and targeted marketing company. Aberdeen's analytical and independent view of the "customer optimization" process of Harte-Hanks (Information - Opportunity - Insight - Engagement - Interaction) extends the client value and accentuates the strategic role Harte-Hanks brings to the market. For additional information, visit Aberdeen http://www.aberdeen.com or call (617) 723-7890, or to learn more about Harte-Hanks, call (800) 456-9748 or go to http://www.harte-hanks.com.

© 2009 Aberdeen Group, Inc., a Harte-Hanks Company
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Boston, Massachusetts  02210-1928
Telephone: (617) 854-5200
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www.aberdeen.com

Contact Information: Media Contact: Nari Viswanathan Aberdeen Harte-Hanks (617) 854-5293 Nari.viswanathan@aberdeen.com